Anyone who honestly believes big business will give any authority to regular shareholders on pay or for that matter, pay executives on results like everyone else, is simply kidding themselves. Not going to happen on its own. Ever. The only way this will change is complete collapse of the economic system (which is also unlikely) or Congress steps in and changes things. As it stands today, business receives too much encouragement to play games like this. It's all there in the existing tax code which even goes as far as allowing business to pay the taxes of these overpaid executives.
Fair is fair and what we have today is unfair. Let's see how well America's corporate leadership does when they have to live by the rules for everyone else. Considering how poorly they are doing today, why should they receive all of the gifts without any of the risk? We used to be a country that sought a level playing field and it's high time we get back to that traditional value. Obviously there are benefits for the select few but for the greater good of both the businesses and America, the benefits are hard to find.
Yea, but what does the world's richest person and most successful investor know about the economy? He supports Democrats so obviously he's a communist and is against our glorious leader. Clearly we need more tax cuts and less regulation as McCain says.
Last Wednesday, the Commerce Department said the economy grew at a 0.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter. But Buffett said the nation's population also grew, making the real growth rate lower. He also said that, even if the data do not show the economy retracting, people feel as though it is.
"The U.S. is in recession as I define it," Buffett said. "I would define that as a situation where people are doing less well than they were three months, six months or eight months earlier and most businesses find themselves in that position too.
"If were are in a non-recession, I don't think people want to see it going in the same direction as it is and saying it's wonderful."
Who knows how long the trend will continue but for now, the euro is king on the street.
The US dollar bill’s standing as the world’s favourite form of cash is being usurped by the five-year-old euro.
The value of euro notes in circulation is this month likely to exceed the value of circulating dollar notes, according to calculations by the Financial Times. Converted at Wednesday’s exchange rates, the euro took the lead in October.
Obviously they aren't reading Larry Kudlow and the CNBC cheerleaders. Of course, Kudlow only hobnobs with the same spongers who just received hundreds of billions in bailout money, so they don't see the economic difficulties in quite the same way as the rest. Must be nice.
Seven in 10 people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say things are going badly, with only 30 percent saying things are going well.
"It's been 16 years since the public gave the country's condition such a bad rating: January 1992, to be precise, in the last year in office of the last president named Bush," CNN pollster Keating Holland said.
"Seventy percent is a lot worse than two years ago, when 48 percent thought times were bad and the Republicans lost control of Congress," CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider added.
Wow, that's a brutal figure. Plenty of people are saying that we have hit the bottom and as great as that would be, I don't see it.
457,000. That’s the number of construction jobs that have been lost since the sector peaked in September of 2006.
What’s interesting to me about this number is that at the beginning of the downturn in housing we didn’t see a huge drop in construction jobs, primarily because workers moved from residential into commercial.
Now that commercial is slowing as well, construction workers are falling out of jobs like flies. And they’re not the only ones. Big surprise furniture manufacturing jobs are falling as well.
Their big mistake was not being worth billions and having connections to the highest levels of Congress and the Administration. If they did, they too would receive billions upon billions and nobody would ask questions and everyone could live today as they did yesterday. Polite company doesn't ask uncomfortable questions about money. Especially when it's not even theirs to shovel out. What do the Democrats have to say for themselves now? They all too easily allowed the banks to get their bankruptcy law and then bailed out the damned banks without question.
Bankruptcy filings by U.S. consumers jumped 47.7 percent in April from one year ago as families cope with fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis, the American Bankruptcy Institute said.
The 92,291 bankruptcy filings in April also marked an increase of 7 percent from March, the non-partisan institute said.
It is definitely good news that the US only lost 20,000 jobs last month. It's not quite celebration material but in this market, Wall Street will take anything. If only they reacted so positively when Americans had real extra cash in their pockets from jobs and not temporary (gimmick) incentives but then again, when is the last time we saw such growth in the middle class?
"Banks have come to realise in the recent crisis that they are paying the price for having designed compensation packages which provide incentives that are not, in the long run, in the interests of the banks themselves, and I would like to think that would change," King said.
Last week the director-general of the CBI, Richard Lambert, said the bonus culture in the City and Wall Street had been responsible for much of the excessive risk-taking that led to the collapse of the US mortgage and housing markets.
King said yesterday, however, that the hubris of which the City had been guilty had now disappeared, as banks were having to raise capital from their shareholders and cut jobs to repair their balance sheets. "I don't think there is much hubris around today. I hope we do not return to this hubris ... it is important that people learn the lessons from this crisis."
I'm sure the banks are learning a good hard lesson as we throw more bailout cash at them without strings. They must be all a quiver with fear. The bankers are no doubt selling their third and fourth houses on Craigslist, right there with their with their yachts and Bentley.
These are amazing numbers and considering McCain's economic program is a third Bush term, Democrats need to finish up the primary and start focusing on November. McCain is going to wish he had a problem like Rev. Wright once the Democrats pounce on these numbers because McCain is joined at the hip with the Bush policies that Americans detest. It's all there from tax cuts for the wealthy, less regulation so we can have new problems, an insurance company free-for-all with health care (Bush's policy as well) and that's only the domestic policy. McCain is already struggling to get traction with his own party and this is hardly going to win over independents as the economy continues to sputter.
Fully 73 percent of Americans now disapprove of President Bush's handling of the economy, as his overall approval fell to 27 percent from 32 percent in March.
That represents a burden to Republican candidate John McCain. With poll respondents rating jobs as the top issue, some 61 percent of Americans say they have "major" or "moderate" concerns that McCain will be too closely aligned with Bush's agenda. That exceeds the half of Americans who express concerns over whether Barack Obama is out of touch with small-town values. A comparable 62 percent of Americans say they have concerns about figuring out where Hillary Clinton stands on the issues.
The important point that jumps out in this video exchange is that the fundamentals are there to support a steady increase in the price of oil. The world has not yet hit a price high enough to have enough of an impact on pressuring consumption. CNBC flashes a chart showing per capita oil consumption and the US numbers are not even close to anywhere else.
The Republicans and Bill Clinton made it easy for Detroit to promote gas guzzlers and energy conservation efforts were pushed to the side and labeled as kooky. The other interesting comment is when Boone Pickens - a billionaire oil trader and not a failed businessman like Bush - says "there are plenty of refineries around the world." This is from a Bush supporter and a very conservative Republican, contradicting what the GOP rolls out almost every day when giving their newest excuse for high oil prices. Bush is correct that there are no easy fixes for the problem, though blaming everyone else for problems the GOP created is just the usual "I didn't do it" spin that we've seen since the beginning.
This is a really interesting bit of information pulled out of the home foreclosure report that came out on Tuesday. Just another sign of how excessive the real estate market was and is even today. This suggests much more room to fall before prices even come close to stabilizing.
The numbers were pretty nasty nationwide, as expected, with activity up 23 percent quarter to quarter and 112 percent year over year.
When you break down the sub-categories, however, you find that the number of bank-owned properties is rising faster than ever before. “Typically you’ll see about 20 percent of the foreclosure filings being bank-owned,” RealtyTrac’s Rick Sharga told me in an interview this morning. “We’re getting to a point now where it’s well over 1/3 and aiming at 40 percent, so that just suggests that a lot of these homes can’t even be sold to investors at auctions – because there’s just no equity in the properties.”
One could definitely argue that Americans collect much too much compared to people in other wealthy countries but still, this is yet another troubling sign. Again, when are the damned Democrats going to join forces with the overwhelming majority of Americans and kick Wall Street's ass for the bailout? It may have been something exceptional but any time you change the terms, well, you change the damned terms. Wall Street received their bailout, so let's tell Wall Street how their financial free-for-all is going to change. You are Congress so start acting like it.
"This is not about downsizing. It's about needing gas money," said Nancy Baughman, founder of eBizAuctions, an online auction service she runs out of her garage in Raleigh, N.C. One former affluent customer is now unemployed and had to unload Hermes leather jackets and Versace jeans and silk shirts.
At Craigslist, which has become a kind of online flea market for the world, the number of for-sale listings has soared 70 percent since last July. In March, the number of listings more than doubled to almost 15 million from the year-ago period.
Craigslist CEO Jeff Buckmaster acknowledged the increasing popularity of selling all sort of items on the Web, but said the rate of growth is "moving above the usual trend line." He said he was amazed at the desperate tone in some ads.
Not a problem though because we just bailed out Wall Street so Mozilo, O'Neil, Prince and their millionaire buddies could all keep their tens of millions in bonus money. They're all a great bunch and the trickle down economics will surely be kicking in at any moment.
If the Democrats fail to speak out and join the rest of America, they deserve to get kicked aside in the fall. People are furious and yet the Democrats miss another opportunity to join voters of all political stripes.
For everyone who boldly stated that the weak dollar would never have an negative impact at home ought to be eating their words about now. Sure a weak dollar can mean better exports for the US but for just about everything else, costs are going up. Republican policies including the war, the deficit, the tax cuts and a pro-business (at the expense of consumers) policy have all added up to create a headache for Americans both rich and poor. Add to this list the increasing problems due to the biofuel craze and you have a serious problem that will not be corrected by a simple action or two as both McCain and Hillary are suggesting.
Obama may not be saying the popular thing when he argues against a temporary tax cut on gas but it's the right thing. McCain and Hillary, who both supported the Iraq war, haven't explained where the money will come from for such a big tax cut nor have they or anyone else explained the financial consequences of the Wall Street bailout. (The bailout continues to be the 800 pound gorilla in the room that remains untouched by Democrats and Republicans alike.) Someone needs to start acting like a grownup instead of telling voters how easy answers are going to magically cure years of bad policy.
Many have been predicting the worst recession in decades and now Warren Buffet, the world's richest person, is moving to this camp.
"This is not a field of specialty for me, but my general feeling is that the recession will be longer and deeper than most people think," Buffett said. "This will not be short and shallow.
"I think consumers are feeling gas and food prices," he added, "and not feeling they've got a lot of money for other things."
No, not the Wall Street collapse and bailout or the skyrocketing price of oil since the Iraq invasion. Not talking about the increasing inflation that is crushing normal Americans. Nope, not talking about the sub-prime bubble bursting nor the failures of post-Katrina reconstruction. And no, this isn't about the budget surplus disappearing into a massive deficit either. Oh and no, this isn't about the corporate welfare called "no price negotiations with Big Pharma despite preaching about the free market" with the Medicare money. This is just another example of failed oversight in the black hole of spending called Iraq.
Millions of dollars of lucrative Iraq reconstruction contracts were never finished because of excessive delays, poor performance or other factors, including failed projects that are being falsely described by the U.S. government as complete, federal investigators say.
The audit released Sunday by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, provides the latest snapshot of an uneven reconstruction effort that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $100 billion. It also comes as several lawmakers have said they want the Iraqis to pick up more of the cost of reconstruction.
It's not very comforting that $200 per barrel is even being discussed but unfortunately, the OPEC president isn't the only person kicking this idea around.
He added: "The prices are high due to the fact of the recession in the United States and the economic crisis which has touched several countries, a situation which has an effect on the devaluation of the dollar, and therefore each time the dollar falls one percent, the price of the barrel rises by $4, and of course vice versa," he was quoted as saying in brief remarks to journalists on Sunday.
He added that: "If this (the dollar) strengthens by 10 percent, it is probable that (oil) prices will fall by 40 percent."
If the U.S. economic situation improved from now to the end of the year "that would help the market to stabilize."
The Republicans like to look back at certain events in history and selectively remember bits and pieces. For example, even today many believe that if only we did (fill in the blank) we could have won Vietnam. Uh huh, right. Another classic theory is that the Great Depression ushered in unnecessary 'socialist' programs that block individual initiative, forcing people to rely on government handouts. Read through this link and think about just how much the likes of Mozilo, O'Neil, Prince and their kind have manipulated the US system in their favor at the expense of everyone else. Let these people play on the same level field as the rest of us and let's see how well everyone does. Here's one of the more interesting perks for America's executives:
Perhaps the most bizarre compensation a CEO receives is assistance paying their income tax on their pay and perks. A new report from The Corporate Library delves into the increasingly common practice of "grossing up".
In a nutshell that means the company picks up the income tax liabilities a CEO faces on his perks, and sometimes even his pay and bonuses. The Corporate Library, in examining 3,297 proxy statements filed between February 2007 and February 2008 found that 20% of CEOs (more than 650 individuals) receive tax gross-ups on part of their income.
To many, Angelo Mozilo is the face of failure. Under his watch he managed to build Countrywide Financial into the largest lender in the US and then almost as quickly, drive it in to the ground where Bank of America would buy it in a fire sale and reap tax benefits for years. Jobs lost, house evictions, ruined lives, it's all there courtesy of Mozilo. So just how tough are times for this failure? They're so bad that he scraped together $132 million in 2007 despite his magnificent failure.
As I've said before, these people who scream about the free market wouldn't know the free market if it bit them in the ass. In an earlier time, after the Crash of '29 for example, people such as Mozilo would be standing on a street corner begging for handouts much like the people who have lost their houses courtesy of his schemes. When I listen to Republicans talking about people needing to toughen up and quit relying on the system, well, what about Mozilo? How is it possible in this day and age to screw up so badly yet walk away so wealthy? It's easy, because this is the system that the GOP created where only the middle class and poor lose. Risk has been minimized at the top and it's everyone else who is stuck with the bill. Good work, when you can find it.
Each day I wonder how things could possibly get worse, but they do. The complete mismanagement by Bush and the GOP is all catching up with the US. Why would anyone think that a third Bush term (with McCain) would be a good idea?
"More consumers reported that their personal financial situation had worsened than any time since 1982 due to high fuel and food prices as well as shrinking income gains and widespread reports of declines in home values," The Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers said in a statement.
The report showed its reading on one-year inflation expectations climbed to 4.8 percent -- the highest since a similar reading in October 1990 -- from 4.3 percent in March.
