FTR, I tend to think that the rich getting rich and a lack of social mobility are probably corrected, and that it’s not a good thing. I don’t like people making broad assumptions about this, including how to fix it. I think it’s one of those things that could be made worse by hasty bullshit fixes.
I’m not wildly successful. I’m not a 1%. I do very well by my own measure and I’m very happy. I’d like to make more and I probably will but I’m not going to sacrifice quality of life to do so.
What exactly would you like me to cite, that I haven’t?
Well, I was just kind of being a douchebag about the whole gummi bear blackforest thing. i appreciate the answer but I hope you weren’t taking that too seriously.
You can’t get laid in Germany? Really?
I mean no offense, but i thought the women there were supposed to be relatively easy.
Why is anyone still wasting their time with this dickhead? The guy who thinks if you haven’t “made it” you’re stupid. The guy who thinks the important players in this game of deception are the stockholders. You know, the ones who are already elite enough to actually own stock in the first place and in whose personal financial interest it is to drive up the price of the stock, not make a better product, innovate something new and exciting or provide a better service.
Idiot.
CEO compensation is also inflated by the practice of stock buy-backs. Several decades ago, the practice of rewarding CEOs with company stock options was supposed to improve the performance of their companies and of the American economy as a whole. That worked out well, didn’t it?
American companies routinely and legally drive up the prices of their stock by buying back shares in the stock market. This is the equivalent of a celebrity author buying mass quantities of his or her own book, in the hope of driving it up best-seller lists. Stock buy-backs do not strengthen the company or lead to innovation. They merely inflate the wealth of the CEO and other company employees who are paid with stock options.
Long-term shareholders might object, but they are a dying breed. Most shareholders want to maximize the price of stocks before they cash out by selling them to the proverbial “greater fool.” Thanks to buy-backs, stock options have aligned the interests of CEOs and shareholders — but at the expense of prudent, long-term investment in American companies and American industries.
Yeah, those guys.
Because they’re the ones who’re going to make this country thrive. They’ve proven to do so well for it so far, right? :rolleyes:
How much money do you think it takes to own stock, Shayna?
According to this cite about half the households in America own stock:
Generally speaking it is not in the interests of the stockholders to try to inflate the price in the short run. Rather it is in their interests to grow the company for the long haul, you know, like AAPL, DE, CL, CLX, BRKB and a whole bunch of others. So no. I think the stockholders interest is what is aligned with what is best for the company.
Finally. They are the owners. The company should be running in their interests. If it’s not, then why own stock?
Stock buybacks are simply a tool that a publically traded company has at its disposal. It is a tool that can be abused. Or, it is a tool that can be used well.
A company that uses it well, might be, for example, a growing company. If it finds that its stock price is trading at a premium because it is doing so well, they may choose to issue stock at this time since that would be a relatively cheap source of capitol for them. Later, if the bloom comes off the rose so to speak, and their stock is no longer hot, or they are in a recession and have excess capitol they may choose to buyback stock. Whether or not it will make sense depends on a calculation concerning the ability to generate growth by investing that money in the business or by buying back stock.
A company may have issued stock in a poison pill to avoid a hostile takeover, or for a host of other reasons that it now makes sense to buy it back.
And Scylla the dumbfuck peabrain proves once again that he misses the whole goddamn point of the Occupy Movement.
We know — all too well — that all these machinations and “tools” are legal and “available” for the wealthy elite to fuck the rest of us over with.
THAT’S WHAT WE WANT TO FIX, YOU GODDAMN MORON.
We fucking KNOW what’s in the long term interest of the average stockholder. And we also know for a fact beyond dispute that the abuses so fucking far outweigh and overtake the beneficial uses that they have literally destroyed this entire country’s economy. DESTROYED IT. It’s a goddamn mess and that is NOT the fault of the middle class and poor who are forced to rely on arrogant jackasses like you to protect their interests above your own.
THAT is why we HAVE government in the first fucking place, you stupid idiot. It’s the responsibility of government to PROTECT US from the evil actors and instead the evil actors have accumulated enough wealth to have put their own minions in seats in government and paid them to change the rules so they could get even wealthier.
We don’t want YOUR goddamn fucked up bought and paid for “Of The Wealthy, By The Wealthy & For The Wealthy” government.
We don’t want fewer regulations because every FUCKING time we loosen them you people prove you weren’t responsible enough to BEHAVE. The citizens of this country MUST be able to count on their government to ensure that corporate interests can NEVER do damage to the nation as a whole. And that is NOT what we’ve had for the past 30-40 years.
YOUR government has slowly but surely picked apart our safeguards for decades.
YOUR government has failed the rest of us and we’re sick and fucking tired of it. You’re about to lose your free ride, so you’d better start saving up.
Now go ahead and pick this apart paragraph by paragraph and spin yourself silly justifying the despicable actions that crashed this economy, that drove the middle class to have no choice but to use credit to survive, that STOLE every penny of equity we’d managed to build up in our homes and retirement accounts. That spews “personal responsibility” then takes absolutely no responsibility of their own.
'Cuz that’ll make you look like less of an asshole.
You’re still essentially asking me to send you copies of my class notes and a few NDA-covered expectation documents from venture capital types.
I did, incidentally, find a cite of our own magellan01 claiming that “Most business[sic] shoot for a profit of 20%” and that such a number is as “realistic. Achievable.” and “a number I’ve heard thrown out for years and years.”
That’s ALSO a fairly ridiculously unrealistic number, IMHO, and one I’ve heard from every business prof I’ve had as the minimum number one should put on any serious business plan.
Not at all. I quoted their literature. They want to tear down the system and make a new communist one. They want, and I quote “revolution.”
Ok. This is interesting. Am I to understand that you think all stock buybacks should be outlawed?
I want to understand. Help me.
So you blame stock buybacks for the current financial debacle? Really?
Ok. I actually follow this. I kind of agree. I disagree as to who the real villains are. I think the villains are at the top of government and at the top of the corporations. I think they are an incestuous bunch, and are one and the same.
Your cite does not say this.
My government? I think the government sucks. I think they are the problem.
You really haven’t listened to anything I said. Who do you think you are talking to? I hate the government. I’ve been arguing that they are the real problem here.
Personally, I think there are two many regulations in the financial industry. Most of them are feckless and useless and simply annoying. I think we need less but much higher quality regulation.
Again with the “my government?”
Well, personally my retirement plan has lost 80% of it’s value. I own my house free and clear, because I’m smart and lucky and I worked hard to pay it down.
Anyway, usually what i try to do when somebody shows up like you do and starts spouting things like this, is that I try to work with them for a couple of posts, see if I can’t find some reason, some common ground for discussion. To reason together.
So far, I’ve pretty much blown up your rolling stone article. Your business week article really doesn’t support what you are saying here.
We are pretty much at the point here where you need to be a bit less like a rabid bitch and more like a reasonable human being if this is to be a fruitful discussion.
It seems to be that you are being hostile without knowing what you are talking about and without even knowing what I am talking about.
Just for shits and giggles why don’t we start from scratch and be nice and see what we do agree on, and try and build from there. Maybe we could have fun and do something productive.
You’ve made the claim that this is a pretty widespread and reprehensible practice in business… shooting for these numbers. You put it out there as something that is endemic in the system.
This is very different from my business school experience in the business world. I don’t think anybody in my world could get away with saying what you claim they all say without being immediately challenged and laughed at.
So, one of us is wrong.
You are the one saying people are doing this. Show me? If it only happens in classes you attend and in NDA’d plans that you see than you can hardly claim that it is widespread.
You would think that there would be some people saying it in public or putting it in writing where you might find a link… yes?
The problem is that nobody says shit like you are saying they do. It’s too obvious a boner.
You are wrong. You are lying. You are cornered, and you won’t admit it.
Scylla, you haven’t “blown up” anything, despite your self-important crowing.
All you have done is proved that you are a lowlife scumsucker who is willing to see this country’s destruction for the sake of your semantic arguments over nitpicky shit that is completely irrelevant to the big picture issue, which you are still to mindnumbingly stupid to get.
Remember, I went through business school at the peak of the tech bubble, and I was dealing with venture cap at the peak of the real estate bubble.
I should say, I’m going to make a small mea cupla here–I’m confusing my terms (relatively badly, actually), and it’s not “20% expected growth”, it’s “20% expected ROE” which is expected to drive high growth rates.
Note: I still think a 20% annual expected ROE (especially in a context of a 9% CAGR of the S&P 500, and similar ones for any other stock index) is ridiculous and wrong-headed, just not as much so as expecting a 20% annual growth rate.
In my own experience, it’s very few companies that can sustain a 20% annual ROE for any length of time. Perhaps a 20% average annual ROE can be sustained during the growth phase in a good market, but I had an early employer destroyed out from under me (I resigned two weeks before 70% of the company was laid off) by a venture capital guy who invested $5mil (small company, natch) and expected to (and did!) pull out $1mil in cash every year. Yeah, that failed spectacularly in Year Three.
Total aside: that guy was every awful stereotype of the 1%. Insisted on every week being crunch time, promised we’d all eventually see stock options (which didn’t even happen, so I don’t even have any pretty wallpaper out of the debacle), would interrupt me working at 8:30PM to show off how you could see his 15,000-sq-ft mansion in Potomac County on Google Maps.
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And I know **magellan **isn’t a cite, except for the fact he’s in here getting your back (ineptly, as usual) while making pretty ridiculous statements elsewhere.
And the reason they want revolution is to kick the people with money out of power so they can establish a new democracy where the 99% control the country instead of the 1%.
If you stop and focus only on the revolution part instead of the actual message, then you are clearly not getting what the movement is about.
The threat of revolution is often used in protests. The Tea Party pushed for second amendment solutions–it’s the same thing. It’s a rattling of the sabers. It’s a showing of power. The point is to remind those in government that they only exist at the will of the people. It’s to point out that, even if you keep Congress under your thumb, the people still have a recourse.
The message of the movement, though, has always been that the current system where the 1% have power over the 99% is not acceptable. The point has always been that the government has shown that it is in the pockets of Wall Street. The entire point was to occupy wall street and tell them to back off. If you don’t get this, then you don’t understand the movement.
See, now we know you are lying. Occupy is even less organized than the Tea Party, so there is no “literature” that speaks for the movement. You made that up. Liar.
May we assume that your use of the small “c” for “communist” reflects at least a marginal political sophistication? That you don’t really want to try and tell us that we are Marxists?
Yadda yadda yadda whatever. You would thing at some point, some where, in the entire internets, that there would be some sort of cite supporting what you say.