Congress investigates CEO Pay

cottonbroker · #11 (**permalink**) 03-08-2008, 01:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by A. Crowley

You closet-homo Bushbots really WoW us with yer insghts.

You are such a moron crawley....You are not a closet fag, you are a straight up one. Oh yea, your slip is showing....Maybe you are one of those retards who cannot multiply 500,000 x .01 so of course I did not expect any different from you. Oh yea, what is an "insghts"?? you idiot

Heckler · #12 (**permalink**) 03-08-2008, 01:57 PM

Business is business? Rather impressive compensation for dismal performance...

They deserve a little bit of scrutiny. Fuck 'em. So they squirm a bit?
good.

satv365 · #13 (**permalink**) 03-08-2008, 02:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mulp

the dumb morons just walk away, and as they put nothing done, they lose nothing. The ones that get screwed are the ones who funded the bad paper, and paid for the $100 million dollar bonuses, and those stupid fools are people like you, who thinks that paying a high fee to a fund manager will result in your retirement savings being invested in sound investments, when instead the quest for bonuses from managing your money meant they used your money to fund the bad paper that is now almost worthless.

So, the real morons in all of this are people like you who have IRAs and 401K that you believe will allow you to retire. It is a good thing that Social Security is a defined benefit and not defined contribution with you take your chances on the benefit.

Further, your own property has gone down in price, so if you need to sell it in the next few years, you will lose there, though over the long term the price will rise to reflect the value.

I find it interesting how shallow the understanding of the economy those who claim to be free market capitalist actually is.

Think about it. If I have no capital at risk, what do I care if the equity on "my property" goes negative from zero. I put no capital into the purchase. If the price goes up, I walk away with a profit. If the price goes down, I walk away with nothing, and the fool who put up the money is stuck with a loss.

The only thing that can be better is to be able to get the deal where one gets a bonus for doing well, and where one gets a big severance package for doing badly. If you win, they get $50M, and if you lose, they get $50M.

Now what control do you have over the bonuses that these guys make for turning your neighborhood into a slum in the making, for making it impossible to sell your house as you seek to move to another town for a better job. Or they destroy trust in the financial markets so you can't borrow money to pay your tuition. Or they drive down the price of your stock portfolio as the market declines broadly.

The fundamental issue is that Government, in the end has no say. Businesses who do these things and suffer are a result of idiocy and lack of foresight on their own part. Government bailing them out is only going to do one thing. Keep failed business practices like these going.

Any free market capitalist with common sense will tell you that this kind of crap would not have worked. Government bailing them out is only encourage more of it.

We should have let them fail and go bankrupt so noone would ever do this stuff again.

mulp · #14 (**permalink**) 03-08-2008, 07:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rob

The people that pay a CEO's salary are the investors of that company or corp. The goverment doesn't own business so they get nothing to say about it.

Actually, under Reagan-Bush-Bush, the regulatory rules for corporations were set so that government gives the CEOs and BODs almost total control over the corporations, and denied the stockholders any real say, other than the right to sell your stock at a loss after a CEO and BOD had compensated themselves richly for running the business into the ground.

Did you notice that all the votes you get on corporate governance have a single individual running for each position, and all the questions are written by management, usually along the lines of "the BOD is authoritized to acquire 100 million shares of stock to be used to grant unqualified stock options to executives."

It makes the elections in Russia and Pakistan look highly competitive.

mulp · #15 (**permalink**) 03-08-2008, 07:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by satv365

The fundamental issue is that Government, in the end has no say. Businesses who do these things and suffer are a result of idiocy and lack of foresight on their own part. Government bailing them out is only going to do one thing. Keep failed business practices like these going.

Any free market capitalist with common sense will tell you that this kind of crap would not have worked. Government bailing them out is only encourage more of it.

We should have let them fail and go bankrupt so noone would ever do this stuff again.

You keep missing the point. The issue isn't the harm done to the corporations writing the loans, the harm done to the borrowers, or the harm done to the people who lost their shirts buying the stocks. Instead the issue is the harm done to the innocent bystanders who had no part, or say, in the transactioncs.

The odds are very high that your local taxes, property, sales, and income taxes, plus the fees for services you must buy from the government, like drivers licenses and car registration, will go up as a result of these outright illegal or barely legal transactions. Governments generally borrow money short term while tax revenue is coming in at rates of 1-2% but those rates have gone up to 10-20%. The government normally invests its money in various money market funds, which instead of earning 3-5% are now earning 0-1% or actually losing money. The costs of dealing with abandoned property also has to be picked up the local government, as well as dealing with unpaid property taxes which requires borrowing money which is more expensive. So, over all, the costs to government are increasing, and they always get to raise their taxes on you.

Around here, students who were depending on low cost student loans are out of luck because the money isn't available in the market.

In many places, the people who want to move to a new town for a new job, or to retire, or otherwise, are stuck because they can't sell their house, and it doesn't matter that they have no mortgage, no one can buy because no one can get a mortgage.

As property values plumet, people get scared and stop spending which makes the economy slow which causes more layoffs which puts more people at risk of not paying rent or mortgages which causes prices to fall more and more vacant housing to occur.

The biggest problem with the depression was the contraction in the money supply. As the money supply is based on the the multiplier that comes from bank not needing 100% reserves, but more like 10-20% reserves, not making loans has the effect of contracting the money supply. That will also slow the economy, yet with so much of goods coming from imports, such as oil, prices will go up regardless of money supply. So that leads to the potential of stagflation.

So, if we end up with stagflation, you can thank the lax regulatory system that allowed the CEOs to earn massive bonuses for mismanaging or defrauding people and destroying trust in the US financial system.

mulp · #16 (**permalink**) 03-08-2008, 08:05 PM

The CEOs got bonuses for doing the things that has caused the effects described in this article, that the Fed and government policy are trying to mitigate:

Quote:

March 9, 2008
Downturn Tests the Fed’s Ability to Avert a Crisis
By VIKAS BAJAJ

In the last seven months, policy makers have cut interest rates, injected money into the banking system and approved a fiscal stimulus package in an effort to keep the economy from slipping into a recession. Often, the moves seemed to work at first, only to be overtaken by more bad news.

The failure of any of the usual fiscal and monetary policy tools so far raises questions about what the Federal Reserve and federal government can do in the near term to counter the forces that have battered housing prices and pushed down the stock market and are now causing a hiring slowdown.

“There are times when there is only so much the Fed can do,” said Barry Ritholtz, chief executive of FusionIQ, an investment firm in New York. “It can smooth out the business cycle a little bit, but last I checked, we haven’t done away with the business cycle.”

One of the main problems now is a deepening crisis of confidence that is compounding the ill effects from the housing downturn. As lenders and businesses become more cautious about who they lend to and hire, they are slowing an already weakened economy.

If the housing boom was a manifestation of irrational exuberance, some say it has swung too far in the other direction, to irrational despondency.

“Banks went from giving money away like drunken sailors to not lending to the most credit-worthy borrowers,” Mr. Ritholtz, who writes the popular economics blog The Big Picture, said.

The latest signs of panic in the markets came last week. Banks began calling in loans they had made to hedge funds, mortgage companies and others, forcing them to sell billions of bonds. The moves prompted concern about securities backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the large government-chartered buyers of mortgages that many investors believe have the implicit backing of the federal government.

When big investors are forced to quickly dump billions of dollars in securities, trading can seize up, especially when buyers are scarce, as they are now. Just a few weeks earlier, a similar bout of forced selling drove down the prices of municipal bonds issued by states and cities.
:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/bu...hp&oref=slogin

If you get laid off from your job, or have your hours shortened, during this time, thank those CEOs who got the bonuses, and the regulators in the Bush adminstration and encouraged them.

But if you lose your job and go bankrupt, I guess you are to blame for your neighbor either making all those bogus loans and your other neighbor borrowing to buy what he couldn't afford.

satv365 · #17 (**permalink**) 03-09-2008, 09:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mulp

You keep missing the point. The issue isn't the harm done to the corporations writing the loans, the harm done to the borrowers, or the harm done to the people who lost their shirts buying the stocks. Instead the issue is the harm done to the innocent bystanders who had no part, or say, in the transactioncs.

The odds are very high that your local taxes, property, sales, and income taxes, plus the fees for services you must buy from the government, like drivers licenses and car registration, will go up as a result of these outright illegal or barely legal transactions. Governments generally borrow money short term while tax revenue is coming in at rates of 1-2% but those rates have gone up to 10-20%. The government normally invests its money in various money market funds, which instead of earning 3-5% are now earning 0-1% or actually losing money. The costs of dealing with abandoned property also has to be picked up the local government, as well as dealing with unpaid property taxes which requires borrowing money which is more expensive. So, over all, the costs to government are increasing, and they always get to raise their taxes on you.

Around here, students who were depending on low cost student loans are out of luck because the money isn't available in the market.

In many places, the people who want to move to a new town for a new job, or to retire, or otherwise, are stuck because they can't sell their house, and it doesn't matter that they have no mortgage, no one can buy because no one can get a mortgage.

As property values plumet, people get scared and stop spending which makes the economy slow which causes more layoffs which puts more people at risk of not paying rent or mortgages which causes prices to fall more and more vacant housing to occur.

The biggest problem with the depression was the contraction in the money supply. As the money supply is based on the the multiplier that comes from bank not needing 100% reserves, but more like 10-20% reserves, not making loans has the effect of contracting the money supply. That will also slow the economy, yet with so much of goods coming from imports, such as oil, prices will go up regardless of money supply. So that leads to the potential of stagflation.

So, if we end up with stagflation, you can thank the lax regulatory system that allowed the CEOs to earn massive bonuses for mismanaging or defrauding people and destroying trust in the US financial system.

Your describing deflation, in regards to the Depression. The Federal Reserve began burning old Gold and Silver Notes and not replacing them. Thus it was a period of hyperdeflation. Meaning, noone had money to pay people for work. That is not the case here.

Our current monetary policies put no, no limits on the amount of Money into cirrculation. Meaning, Congress has the go ahead to usher in as much Inflation as possible.

Stagflation will never occur under these circumstances. If anything a falling dollar and skyrocketing Gold Prices point ever so clearly to soon to come round of hyperinflation.

satv365 · #18 (**permalink**) 03-09-2008, 10:09 PM

I will further add that if Congress had a solid and consistent Monetary Policy, not tied to the economic recessions and depressions that come with it's blunders in central management (look that up).

This would not be an issue.

Congress needs to give us sound monetary policies and start prosecuting fraud, protecting property rights, and getting the fuck out of economic management.

Chef · #19 (**permalink**) 03-10-2008, 03:30 PM

Since congress is so interested in a CEO's pay, shouldn't we be asking for our money back from congress? They keep voting pay raises for themselves and instead should be taking pay cuts.

rob · #20 (**permalink**) 03-10-2008, 07:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chef

Since congress is so interested in a CEO's pay, shouldn't we be asking for our money back from congress? They keep voting pay raises for themselves and instead should be taking pay cuts.

I whole heartedly agree with your post.