I consider it a serious cartoon without a serious mindedness. The animation cheerfully presented the dismal truth.
I have made my point, Shodan. It seems unlikely that you will be satisfied with more clarification of the same position.
DeLay no longer needs a government position. He discovered a natural talent for television and now works as a political analyst (pundit) for cable news. Maybe Jefferson will land a similar gig after exhausting his court appeals.
Like CEOs, politicians appear to have golden parachutes, but, instead of a pre-negotiated excessive severance package, politicians are rewarded with lucrative media or consulting contracts. Wall Street, media, and K Street will work together to protect their shared financial interests.
Wow…not even close. In 8+ years around here I am unsure I have ever been so thoroughly misrepresented.
Writing my Congresscritters is the only thing about what I said you got correct. You had also told me to just not give them my money but failed to point out how I keep my money from the IRS without being guilty of tax evasion.
Regardless of what I wrote to my reps Congress did, in fact, go ahead with the bail out. Is this in dispute?
And where did I say or even imply, “Now my Congressmen will listen to me. Now I will have my say. Now the ‘power of the people’ will come to bear. They will do exactly what I want. This time.”?
Maybe you missed it but this is Great Debates. We talk about lots of things here. We toss out our ideas and hash them out with other Dopers. Nowhere and nowhen do I see it suggested “they will do what I want” because I posted here. Perhaps this is all just mental masturbation for the lot of us. Perhaps we have some small effect on adjusting opinions of others. Perhaps those ideas take root and grow or, more likely, no one but the few of us reading these things ever considers it and nothing changes. We do it anyway and your assertion is a flat out misrepresentation of anything I have said.
Oh but I did. Credit markets froze practically overnight. The grease of the business world dried up which has all sorts of profound and unhealthy impacts generally summed up as the inability of businesses to do business and civilians inability to get loans for all sorts of things (so they cannot buy stuff which keeps business in business). Again this is not in dispute. Pick up a newspaper sometime and read it. Hard to miss these past few months. It is what happened. Period. End of story.
How you keep hand waving this away is nothing short of shocking. It’s like you are arguing that the sun does not rise in the east despite the evidence of your own eyes that it does. Here lies your “cognitive dissonance”!
Jeebus…
“The US unemployment rate has soared to 8.1%, its highest level since December 1983.” (cite)
"The number of U.S. homes heading toward foreclosure more than doubled in the first quarter from a year earlier, <snip> Nationwide, 649,917 homes received at least one foreclosure-related filing in the first three months of the year, up 112 percent from 306,722 during the same period last year, RealtyTrac said.
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The latest tally also represents an increase of 23 percent from the fourth quarter of last year." (cite)
"U.S. retail sales dropped a seasonally adjusted 1.1% in March, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday,
<snip>
In the past year, sales are down 9.4%. The figures are not adjusted for price changes.
Retail sales in the first quarter were down 1.2% compared with the fourth quarter of last year, raising the possibility that real consumer spending may have fallen again in the first three months of 2009 after plunging at a 4% annual rate in the final six months of 2008." (cite)
"Business failure rate soars as credit crunch starts to claim victims
The gloomy picture is further supported by the latest CBI report, which reveals that business volumes fell to a balance of -30%." (cite)
“The government’s financial bailout will be the most expensive single expenditure in American history, potentially costing around $7.5 trillion – or half the value of all the goods and services produced in the United States last year.” (cite)
Take that figure of $7.5 trillion for the bailout. Now consider there are 105,480,101 households in the US (US Census cite). Do a little math and you get $71,103.46, per household, to pay for that. Median household income, 2007 – $50,740 (same census cite above).
Yep! You’re right! No knock on effects! No different than Braniff going under! Nothing to see here! Move along! :rolleyes:
Good grief man…what rock are you living under? Your comparisons are sooooo far off base from actual reality of what is happening that it boggles the mind you try and make Braniff and this remotely equivalent.
And I have cognitive dissonance? Not enough “rolleyes” for that.
It is the fault of a poor regulatory environment. Good god…
Here, I’ll just give you the following quote. He says it better than I can anyway. He is not by any means alone in this assessment.
You are saying that corporations have to bribe a CEO with a golden parachute so he doesn’t sabotage the shareholders for personal gain. Essentially, the motivation to pay corporate executives is fear of fraud. This is a sweet deal for the CEO who walks away richer no matter how he manages a firm.
Considering the typical amount of a golden parachute, shareholders also have to bribe the CEO with higher pay so he doesn’t just walk away with his parachute guarantee.
My heart aches for corporate executives. :rolleyes: Mr. Nardelli’sexperience is a good example of the consequences a CEO can expect for poor performance.
Not exactly true. The finance division of my company would still loan, as was confirmed by my banking friends, that banks would still loan out money if you have good credit. Several banks didn’t need TARP money. Frankly, I think this was a prime time for local banks to expand, but thanks to the Fed Gov’t, assets were bought and moved around before local banks had a chance to act.
Additionally, not everyone thinks that the economy needs a bailout. Capitalism requires a business cycle. The numbers are scary, but in context, it could be a lot worse. And, there are significant dangers from over-bailing out these industries, as well as the general intrusion of government in the market.
But, hey we have to try something right? The minuscule dollars that these executives make is just the solution that this country needs, right? Let’s have a passively accountable entity like the government, with little market expertise define “long term” goals of CEOs, so that those goals can be objectively aligned from a subjective decision-making process. What would happen is that CEOs would only make short-term decisions align to these long-term goals and any type of long-term planning which requires risk of loss would be totally avoided. This could have the strange effect of prolonging business cycles and stagnating the economy because the lack of risk leaders would be willing to take.
I have no doubt some loans were being made here and there but far too few to run the economy well.
I cannot speak to what opportunities smaller banks may have had but were prevented from doing by the bailout. That said how much time did we have? Businesses need these loans to operate (very normal, very common loans). In the absence of these loans the businesses can fail in a matter of weeks being unable to pay workers and such. Did we have months for smaller banks to get in the game in a big way?
Certainly that is a question with lots of healthy debate. I think the consensus is among economists and business is while the bailout sucks not bailing out these companies would be worse. More a lesser of two evils calculation.
Minuscule? Last year Wall Street execs pulled down $18 billion (cite). And that despite many of them sucking up tax payer dollars for their failed companies. That was not the highest ever either being the sixth highest on record. IIRC (I’d have to look for the cite) the record compensation was $40+ billion in a year.
I don’t know what your definition of minuscule is but that does not fit my definition and especially not when that money is being paid by me out of my taxes.
Sorry…not following that.
I am not having the government tell anyone what their long term goals should be. Just trying to align executive compensation with healthy growth of their companies and not rewarding short term decisions that spike the company’s balance sheet up and thus the executive compensation only to have it be an unsustainable spike and it all falls to shit (but why should the CEO care…they toddle off with a stunning payday anyway).
The executives have NO down side. They are incented to make short term, unsustainable decisions. That is goofy.
Again I use the example of someone who is paid to lose 20 pounds and the sooner the better. They can dehydrate 20 pounds off in a day or two, collect their pay and walk. Of course that is not the kind of weight loss envisioned, it will all come crashing back and has undesirable health consequences. Better is to eat healthy and exercise and lose that 20 pounds over the course of a few months. The resulting person will be FAR better off for it than the dehydrate route. So, pay the person who loses weight for losing 20 pounds that comes off and stays off some months down the road.
I empathize with Winston Smith and understand his world.
The fact that G.W. Bush, the proud free marketeer, based his presidency on a theory that amounts to a totalitarian executive branch is overlooked by market fundamentalists. There hasn’t been a country, with the exception of maybe Bolivia which still used force to suppress dissent, with a democracy and a laissez-faire economic philosophy.
To me, the real disconnect is with market purists who refuse to acknowledge or are unable to recognize that human beings are not usually rational in their market behavior. When you suggest that people should make decision for themselves and the free market is nothing more than choice, it ignores the complexity of human behavior and the evidence that demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate behavior.
The drive for profit in corporate media tends to marginalize any competing ideas to the free market but Dan Ariely’s work challenges free market assumptions about behavior and received some attention in print media.
He also has a fun website: Predictably Irrational
Ugh, executive pay is disgusting, especially considering all they need is a couple of years, a slight increase in stock, and suddenly they pocket millions. Meanwhile, the long-term health of the company is completely ignored for the sake of short-term gains.
I’m not an economist, but a pay ratio that hinges on their worker’s standard pay seems a good idea.
The thing is, most of the free market advocates I know do understand this. People make irrational choices all the time. Hell, if they didn’t then it would be damn hard to make any money investing. The problem is, everyone thinks that it’s all the other guys making the irrational choices, not themselves. It’s all well and good to say we should get the smartest and most knowledgeable guys writing regulations and guiding the market, but no one can agree on who those guys are. Most of them of them will have biases of their own, too. And if they’re wrong, they can really fuck things up, much moreso than if they were just a private actor.
The thing about human complexity is that this point of view argues against excessive meddling, due to the unpredictable nature of it.
