Whobe....good to see ya! When I read that the only jobs available in Elkhart were strippers I was wondering if you'd changed careers!!
You are just disagreeing and picking fights with me personally now. I have never said they were in control since 2001. This bunch took charge in 2006. As this article from the Washington Post and this article from the New York Times clearly shows, the Democrats took control of the Senate and House respectively in 2006. I want you to go back and just start googling the sh*t out of news stories. Check out the fear and hyperbole that we dealt with since 2001. Check the timelines of things since 2006. Where does the collapse begin? Where does the lack of leadership begin? When do things go from being 'dangerous times' to a flat out economic disaster? I think the Republicans were justifiably removed from power in 2006 because they had gone away from what they were suppose to be. I am all about accountability. What I can't stand is that from 2006 to 2009, the Democratic House and Senate has received a pass for their disastrous behavior simply because their was a Republican in the White House. Now they control all Legislative and Executive Branches and this is all still the fault of Republicans?? This is getting worse and worse since 2006 and somehow it is all still George W Bush's fault...... nonsense.
No career change yet but am willing to keep all my options open. I understand that senior citizen porn is all the rage in Japan so who knows"lights....camera..action! Let's make the magic" :lol: BT you owe me that beer
Here is a great article from Time on the top 25 people to blame and I have posted poll results and the original article as well. There is plenty of blame to go around and most of you have commented on just about all of the culprits at one time or another: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1878509_1878508,00.html http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350,00.html This thing was in full bloom already by the time the Dems took over in 2006 with a small majority in Congress and a GOP president not in the mood to give too much to the other side. But the financial Katrina had already formed off Cape Verde by then and with no regulation in place it wasn't slowing down post 2006 either....which by the way was only about 27 months ago Corey. And of note....since Obama took office less than a month ago there is already serious heat being brought down on Wall Street executive compensation and it would have been very hard for the head of Lehman Brothers to take down 500 million dollars in personal compensation with such a poor performance by his company if these conditions had existed during his tenure. In the last part of the Bush GOP presidential reign in late 2008 all we heard about was the few million pulled in by the auto industry execs which was a very paltry sum compared to the multi-billion dollar rip-off going down on Wall Street and about which no one in the Bush admin seemed to care about looking into.
So we're in my office this morning talking about the dot com boom because, well, it has a lot to do with the industry I am in... How many competitors are now long gone who were once major players in the dot com industry.. The dot come bubble had burst before W came into office.. That was a major problem that Bush inherited, but somehow it was his fault. The unregulated, reckless and unchecked dot com industry over-inflated a market and led a nation into believe the nonsense about a 'surplus' in the Clinton Administration... ignoring the fact that it was a projected surplus based upon many factors including a roaring dot come industry that was not realistically being assessed. The dot com bubble burst officially began March 10, 2000. Ten months and ten days before George W Bush took office.. That 'burst' cost us 5 trillion dollars in market value from 2000 to 2002... The Election debacle in which Al Gore attempted to pull a "Franken" and steal an election after the fact... This delayed the selection of a cabinet and putting the pieces together to form a new Executive leadership which proved costly when the next shoe dropped. Then came Sept 11th 2001... George W Bush's fault... Hell, we had a committee tell us that. It must be true. Then Hurricane Katrina in 2005... Bush's fault. Never mind the state and city who had long ignored warnings to prepare.. We got ourselves a built in scapegoat in Dubya. Folks wanted their prescription drugs covered so he gives them Medicare Part D.. passed in 2003 but in effect Jan 1 2006.. Grandma wasn't getting her meds and a reported 15.2% of people foregoing their medications due to cost but that figure is now down around 10% just 2 years later. Still, he gets no credit for bringing the public what they wanted.. he gets the blame for the cost. (for the record, I am against this program) So this bring us to 2006... No more Republican Congress. A new day is promised for all... Economic recovery is not only right around the corner, but it will be launched in the first 100 days. So what did we get? Soaring gas prices, a collapsed housing market, a collapsed financial market, a collapsed auto industry.. on and on and on. Now true.. you could say that ALL of these things were struggling for years to one extent or another, but they were somehow kept afloat or at least in business. Yet somehow with the election of the Democratic Congress in 2006 we started a new era of zero accountability. All things that have taken place (including those things that were in existence before they took office) were all blamed firmly on the GOP and George W Bush... but now they aren't in charge, yet it is still their fault. So now they are all gone. Dubya, the GOP Congress... all of them.. and it is still Bush's fault. Just tell me, please, at what point in time do the Democrats become accountable for what is going on?? "W" was held immediately accountable due to the existence of a GOP Congress... why not Obama?
....more noteworty is why it's anybodys business what a company, its owners and it's Board decides to pay it managers besides the company, its owners, Board and its managers. With the exception of those firms that accept federal capital investment with the conditions of compensation limits known, the government has no role to play in the salary policies of private companies. I do understand its a very politically popular thing to do......surely the President has morre important things to do.....
.....this is one of the things that truly slay me. The $500 million.....what is the $500 million? The $500 million is the aggregate value of his compensation package since 2000 at the time of its grant. Now, the $500 million.....what is it? What it is not is cash money....or a check on the 15th and the 30th. The vast majority of it is in stock....valued at the time of its grant, almost in all cases with conditions imposed upon it that are contingent on meeting certain performance metrics.....the option component which is probably the majority, only has value if the price of the stock goes up, it it goes down, it has zero value......guess what? The value of Lehman stock is nada....zero, nuttin'. Now tell me the value of the Lehman Bros CEO compensation is......? It surely wouldn't make for good television......its a circus.
This whole mess is beyond belief. Yesterday I received an e-mail from Bank of America that there are shutting down their equipment leasing division, effective immediately. Furthermore, they are shutting down their on-line portal that allows it's customers ( businesses like mine ) to monitor its leases with it's customer base. That's it. We're done. No warning. Good luck! BOA will continue to collect its lease revenues but we will have no access to the portfolio data base that WE made possible for them. I can understand them shutting down their equipment lease division for future business if it is under performing ( and with BOA I think we can assume that is the case ) but to cut its customer base off cold turkey goes beyond the pale. So when I see that pompous ass of a CEO on TV begging for coin I tend to want to kick him in the nuts. But that's just me. Opinions may vary.
Hey speaking of Katrina, anyone else wonder how 2,000,000 folks could make it into DC in less than 48 hrs. to attend the Obama inagurattion in below freezing weather but 200,000 folks couldn't get out of New Orleans with 4 days notice???
George....that is complete B/S but par for the course lately. I am reading in the Detroit paper that the automakers are still going to have to jump through hoops to satisfy their loan requirements, etc. and that 40 major suppliers have declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy and are seeking their own loan bailout money. I am glad I am not directly affected anymore but in reality I am very affected as I need to sell my home in Michigan to relocate to Florida and once there I need a thriving US economy to be successful in sales no matter what or who I am selling to so I still don't want autos to fail. The brusqueness that you are dealing with with regard to BOA is the cold-hearted nature of recent events and there aren't enough people out there dealing with those kinds of issues. Good luck.
Gip, I have no doubt that some of the nation's best and brightest bankers flocked to the Corn Belt Bank and Trust Company, Pittsfield, IL to work their mad skills..... As a practical matter, we have averaged over one hundred bank failures a year since 1980....there is alot of excess capacity in the banking industry. We have almost 8000 banks in this country...that is way too many. It's times like these that help reduce capacity to where it needs to be....
No it's not. The problem began years ago with the industry's infatuation with bigness. It's carried through a few decades of offering smaller bank stockholders offers they couldn't refuse, of crossing state lines, of just flat out reducing competition, of creating greater pressure on earnings from larger, more diversified bodies of stockholders, of compromising fundamental sound judgement in an effort to increase earnings.....to the quagmire that exists today. What an arrogant and ignorant statement! To show that kind of disrespect to smalltown bakers tells me where your mindset is....up in the clouds with the rest of your arrogant cronies. It tells me that you don't know nearly as much about the fundamental principles of banking as you purport to know.
Oxymoron: from Wikipedia An oxymoron (plural oxymorons or, more rarely, oxymora) is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms. Oxymoron is a loanword from Greek oxy ("sharp" or "pointed") and moros ("dull"). Thus the word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron. Oxymorons are a proper subset of the expressions called contradictions in terms. What distinguishes oxymorons from other paradoxes and contradictions is that they are used intentionally, for rhetorical effect, and the contradiction is only apparent, as the combination of terms provides a novel expression of some concept, such as "cruel to be kind" or "team of mavericks". The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective-noun combination. ex: "the nation's best and brightest bankers"
Sid, Sid, Sid....why are you always picking on me? :wink: In truth, the US banking system has been one of the most fragmented financial systems in the world and carries with it all the baggage that a grossly inefficient structure has.....for example, in the US we have 8400 banks and 7900 credit unions or over 16000 depository institutions for a population of 300 million. 16000! By contrast, in Canada, they have 14 banks.....in the UK they have 15 banks and 55 building societies - much like our S&L's for a total of 70 depository institutions. In France, 700 or so and on it goes throughout the developed world..... Here, as a result of a patchwork of archaic state and federal regulation, we still have 1 depository institution for each 19,000 residents. By contrast in Europe, nobody is closer than 1 for every 40,000 residents. In the UK, the number is 1 for every 900,000. Canada, 1 for every 2.2 million, and on....so even the most fragmented of the developed economies still in the world would have only 1/2 as many banks as we have in the US.....with all due respect Sid, by any measure the industry has excess capacity and so long as there are economic benefits to consolidation, consolidation will continue...... Hmmmm, without being disrespectful to small town bankers but I'm relatively certain that few of the top grads from any of the top 25 business schools in the US or the world for that matter sent an application to good old Corn Belt Bank and Trust....I could be wrong by I don't think so.
Terry, As has happened before, we will just have to agree to disgree re: our individual assessments of the banking system. This most recent conversation points out how far apart we are in our views. IMO, it's because you currently are immersed in the financial community, and I'm going back to my past experiences and observations. Whatever the reason for our differences, I don't want to get into an argument that has no end. I have too much respect for you and your intelligent insights. I've learned more from my discourse with you and others in Skybox than I ever could contribute. Moving on, check out the article I'm about to post in a new topic about oil prices. My son sent it to me. It is very enlightening for me and causes me to make an about face in my oft-expressed attitude toward the reason for higher gas prices.
....purport? :shock: :lol: Sid , I don't purport to purport anything......I share my observations based upon my experiences and my own individual perspective. If that is purporting, then it would seem to me that we are purporters all........btw, I have emailed an article to you that may provide a little bit more of my perspective on the consolidation of the banking industry without purporting too much...... :wink: