In the few days in December while he was still in charge, Mr Thain reportedly spent nearly $4bn on staff bonuses. That's peanuts on Wall St. In 2007 Mr Thain himself received $83m. During the time Mr Thain was busy cost-cutting, he spent $1.1m doing up his office - $86,000 for a rug, $35,000 for something called a commode on legs.
In another post, Mr Rot rails against the "demonization of Wall Street". Well, OK. But what's wrong with exposing those gangsters who push around little pieces of paper while skimming billions in the process, with nothing tangible to show for it at the end of the day, except their lined-up pockets (or their filled-up commodes)? I say, let the free market show its displeasure, and cut this racket down to size.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
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15 comments:
Where's Barney rank in all this?
You and AA are falling for the pinko party line.
Barney is Barney, and the bankers are the bankers. They both play their roles in this meltdown. Is multipolarity too difficult a concept for you to grasp, Mr Rot?
While at it, here is the lament from the bankers' wives. Ryan Tate, writing on Gawker.com, called the women "an imploding caste of spoiled harpies" whose boyfriends and ex-lovers "spent their economic plunder as carelessly as they hoarded it." Let them seethe.
More on this debate: I think the best way to resolve this bonus controversy once and for all is to call the bankers’ bluffs. They keep saying they need bonuses to retain talent - a hard argument to make for banks that are barely solvent, like Citigroup - and that if they don’t pay, their top people will leave. So let’s just find out if that’s true. Let those talented people look elsewhere. See how well the job market greets financial executives with resumes from bailed-out banks. Damn right.
To which Mr Rot's alter ego replies: Hearing the media elite debate this topic is so friggin' hypocritical that I'm in stitches. Former overpriced market cap giants like the NYT and GE-parent of CNBC-have seen their share prices break as hard as investment banks. Brian Williams of NBC is the 2nd or 3rd highest paid employee at GE. Chris Mathews (4.8m) and Olberman (4mil) entertain less than a million viewers a night. And I'd LOVE to know how much NBC pays top producers of prime time programming. Yet the media is a WATCHDOG over the bonus pool of traders and staff at other publicly traded corporations. A top agency trader at a million a year is a hell of a lot more valuable and harder to replace than a bunch of TelePrompter reading clowns who get a "tingle up their legs" at the empty rhetoric of some half ass Chicago lawyer turned Messiah...
Well, sure. But then, pox on both their houses. I'm sick and tired of all these over-priced primma donnas, especially when they screw us all up, while making out like bandits. Let's have a level playing field, willya?
Yup
Lock 'em in the same dungeon and let the Frank and Madoff show begin. Someone's gotta be the bottom, right?
too difficult for you to grasp...
Tecs, I think the bankers' job of shuffling little slips of paper is more than you're acknowledging and what Barney and Chris did is all too understandable.
I also think that the guy that is really suffering here, the guy out of a job with no savings or retirement or options, that guy there thinks that what you do is shuffle little pieces of paper around not knowing shit about that either.
Bottom line is that you and AA don't know shit about what you're talking about inre the banks and so should calm some of your Hitchensian heat, for it produces no light but glaring extreme emotional seething, much as a professor in a women's studies program 'analyzes' some historical fact.
The bankers might well have an argument that it was Fannie Mae and the rest of the gov shit that brought them down and if they're getting bailed out by the government, it is because the government guaranteed some paper and then welched.
What blather is Arse dishing out? Banks can go belly up for all sorts of legitimate reasons. They take gambles, they have risks, sometimes even wise moves backfire, usually stupid moves backfire. If that was all that was going on, then ok, bad luck.
But, what you seem to be making a fetish out of not seeing, what deserves the most pungent criticism are two things:
First, fraud. Madoff, for example, was a fraud. Ponzi schemes are illegal even if you were to be upfront about it, but they are definitely fraud when you lie to people about it. And Madoff did. He Royally lied. The only work his slips of paper were doing were trying to set out a paper trail of lies that no one could penetrate. It is true that I, nor any of us on FCP, I think, has had practice in that sort of art. Fantastic.
Second, lack of accountability. It used to be quite simple in american economics. If you ran the ship into the ground, you were cashiered. If your leadership made the enterprise go kaput, well no bonus for you. If you fucked up royally, then you were royally fucked.
Now we have a wide swath of our current generation of "economic leaders" who are the first on the golden lifeboat as thousands sink beneath the waves on a ship foundered by the incompetence of the captains. The game is set up to protect the pelf of those who failed the enterprise, and those who slogged dutifully in the belief that all needed to hang together for the good of the company are the ones getting the shaft.
Taking government money, intended as aid to ailing companies, or even their salvation, and using it as massive for bonuses for the shitheads who led these enterprises into disaster? Fuck that, Rot.
The only slips of paper those incompetents [at best] deserved were the color pink.
Now what about all those shithead government frauds and incompetents, are they a huge, the major, force behind this mess? Sure, they deserve jail or ruin or both just as much as Madoff or the cretins of Citicorp do. Barney Frank is a criminal, and he should rot in jail. Will they get this? Almost surely no. Is that bloody unfair and damaging to this country? Sure.
But, does it then follow that we should go Arse up before Madoff style rot, and just accept rule by gangster in the private as well as the public sector? Hell no.
Print this out, Arse, and you'll have a slip of paper you can believe in.
Madoff is not Citi, right, AAss?
Madoff was a huckster and he made off with the money a bunch of greedy fucks gave him. Yeah, it's illegal, but I ain't got a dog in this fight. Let them all go broke and if Madoff ends up in jail, that's ok with me. The morons on the board of Brandeis that gave him millions should be jailed as well for intemperance and greed. You think they'll lose their jobs?
You apparently have never had the pleasure of dealing with an attorney. This is SOP. They're crooks and if you deal with them you get your hands dirty and your pockets picked.
Your seething horseshit about a lack of accountability is a bit closer to some virtual target out there, but you've forgotten that in America there's no accountability anymore. To insist on it for a banker is some kind of class war bullshit dished out by the New Republic hacks and hoos meant to cover Barney Frank's responsibility.
It is quite clear that Fannie Mae could have brought the whole house down without any of your hated Citi employees with four-footed commodes having any responsibility let alone incompetence.
You're making as much sense as n_a with his goddamned uptick bullshit being at the root of all this (if not indeed Prescott Bush). Take a cold shower.
Why not shut your four-footed commode, is all I ask.
You got a Citi bigshot in your sites, then aim and fire, but this blanket condemnation is senseless beyond the single-malt hazed "fine mind" you so laud, you AAss.
Arse, Madoff is the fraud example, Citi serves for the lack of accountability example. Clear?
Your purported defense of your intial dribblings is "hey, fuck accountability. Americans don't like accountability, so very uncool to hold that against the Wall St. pukes. "
Hey, then by that line no can be held accountable, nor should be. All Barney Franks all the time on Planet Rot. So very cool, fo sho, bro.
Dunno what the heck you mean by "blanket condemnation". Throwing blankets over cesspools maybe a tradition, but that shit don't fly this side of the Pecos. Tecumseh, myself, have been pretty damn specific as to it being Madoff, and the other known fraudsters, and the too many "leaders" of corporations, not just among bankers, who make sure theirs is a very golden parachute while all still aboard crash in flames.
To those honest men of Wall street, who rigorously sought the best investments for their clients and who set their compensatin proportionate to how well these investments ran, kudos. To those honest politicians who did not seek to use their power or influence to enrich themselves, their friends, and to hell with the public good, but actually took seriously their elected duties with transparency and principle, kudos.
To the shitheads among both camps, who made your opportunities in life a chance to play Little Caligula, fuck you to tears.
As for "single malt hazed fine minds."....... that gibberish has a certain grandeur of incomprehensibility and nonsequiturnish to make Mikey Moore blush. Even Pepe would acknowledge that, in Rot's new maveniness, he has met a superior Arse.
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Yours, perhaps is a superior arse, being better-practiced.
Thus spake the Maven of Arse-nail
You calling me Arsene Wenger?
The Voyeur, hisself.
I war seen wanking.
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