Obama seems to think so. From the CS Monitor:
Maybe Iowa Senator Charles Grassley and President Obama have more in common than they think.
At least there are similarities when they discuss AIG.
Just two days ago Grassley told an Iowa radio station that AIG executives should consider suicide as an option. He later clarified that his remarks were just rhetorical and they should live.
Good enough.
But today, President Obama took that rhetoric in a different direction. He actually upped the ante explaining that AIG is like a suicide bomber.
“We had to step in, it was the right thing to do, even though it is infuriating,†Obama said, explaining why the government needed to bail out the troubled banks.
“The same is true with AIG,†he said. “It was the right thing to do to step in. Here’s the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.â€
Unless, of course, they are part of the Weathermen.
Then you give them tenure and present them as mainstream and respectable academic “reformers” — y’know, just a person in your neighborhood.
BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!
(h/t Gateway Pundit)
So, does this make suicide bombers like AIG?
If one walks up to a congressional delegation, should they try to impose confiscatory tax rates on him?
Well, it has been said by someone smarter than me:
It’s not enough to say that equality in America is proven when a talented black man gets as far as a talented white man. Cream, of any color, will rise to the top.
The true measure of equality in America is when an incompetent black man can get as far as an incompetent white man. That is the death of ‘white skin’ privilege.
I can not remember where I read that, so my apologies to the author.
And it the author is an Obama fan, I apologize again ’cause:
EKUALITEE!!!111!!! BaBY: we haz it.
And to the contemporary home of the origin of suicide bombing and the Cult of Death, we say**:
No doubt. With this putz at the helm their hopes have now surpassed their once wildest dreams.
I don’t know how this ignorant douche even keeps his skull inflated. Obviously, he’s speaking off the teleprompter, again.
Dude does need to shut his dumbhole, but your comparison is a gratuitous slur on suicide bombers.
The Weatherkids ran clear of their bombs so they’d live to fill the slots waiting for them in the Machine when their “Daddy LOOK!” tantrum was over.
Suicide bombers mean it.
OT: I’m sure everyone has heard that the Fed monetized $1.15 trillion in debt earlier this week. All that debt was replaced with brand new money, fresh off the presses. Why don’t they just do that with the rest of our debt? That way it would all be gone.
The hubris of this asshole and his filthy ilk. They’re politicians. They don’t even govern well, but they are going to run companies well? I think this country has passed me by.
Obama a hypocrite! I am sure the MSM shocked, shocked that hypocrisy is taking place.
I’m sure everyone has heard that the Fed monetized $1.15 trillion in debt earlier this week.
I did. So did the Chinese.
Hey now sweetie, Ayers only blew up a chick.
Tin-horn Jesus Blows Futile Horn: Film at 11:00
Projection, his hand is the one that can “blowup” the economy. AIG is simply being set up as the fall guy. Good scapegoats are to be treasured and saved for when you need them.
Apparently if AIG can’t pay bonuses with taxpayer money it will be like a mushroom cloud or yellocake or something.
Seriously. These people act like there aren’t millions of people around who are just dying to work 70 hour, high stress jobs for free.
Imagine where we would be if they hadn’t done their jobs. Or didn’t have taxpayers to give them money to pay them for having done such a great job.
meya, like all leftoids, has the hunter-gatherer-scavenger mentality. Production is a myth; resources simply appear, and the proper task of society is to allocate them properly.
Which is why production is so weak in the US, right now. Producers look at the situation and say, “Why bother? If I make any money you’ll just take it away, and if I don’t make money you’ll just take what I produce. Easier to just sit on my ass.” –That’s the ones who don’t just pack up and move elsewhere, although “elsewhere” is getting pretty rare these days.
About the only thing left was agriculture and financial management. Now we’re getting into trade wars over agriculture and turning the financial management over to Barney Frank and Associates. meya is going to discover that there’s damn little to tax if this keeps up.
Regards,
Ric
They’ll have to start taxing stuff you already have even more, just like they do property. Tax all your cars, tax your possessions, tax the amount of money you have at the end of the year.
There is PLENTY of room for more taxes.
“There is PLENTY of room for more taxes.”
You betcha. My dad, a deomcratic apparatchik, if ever there was one, just screamed with righteous indignation once at dinner, “Hell, we aren’t taxed enough!” We were visiting, bringing the grandkids to see grandma and grandpa, but when he said this my 9 year lifted her head, looked at me and gave me a beautiful smile. One thing, though. My parents live in a relatively low taxed small city. I don’t. I, too, just looked at him, with a cocked neck, and said to myself, “it’s for the kids. It’s for the kids”.
“meya, like all leftoids, has the hunter-gatherer-scavenger mentality. Production is a myth; resources simply appear, and the proper task of society is to allocate them properly.”
Like that old right wing slogan: “labor creates all value.”
Hey, SFAG: who’s going to feed you if all the producers go away?
Better think about that now. That collective farm thingie doesn’t work very well in practice, you know.
Imagine where we would be if they hadn’t done their jobs.
I wish that you could. I truly do.
Like that old right wing slogan: “labor creates all value.â€
Demonstrate why that isn’t correct or shove off.
Oh come now, collective farming works just fine, provided always that you are the oxen.
Meya – if we don’t pay the AIG bonuses, we’ll have government abrogating contracts and imposing bills of attainder, both of which are unconstitutional. Small point to a leftoid, I admit, but still to be borne in mind.
Meya:
It would appear you haven’t heard:
Before the bailout, those folks signed a contract with AIG wherein if they did X, AIG would give them $Y.
And when Congress was putting together the bailout agreement, they left in language that said that the contracts would be honored.
So AIG, silly them, figured that it would be OK to abide by the Congressional language and fulfill the contracts. It’s not a case of suddenly finding a wad o’cash in their hands and blowing it on bonuses, though the press isn’t careful to make that distinction.
So then Washington polls become OUTRAGED by the fact that AIG did what Congress said they could do.
Does that seem right? What if Oprompta did that to you and yours? Would you receive the OUTRAGE as just criticism for your sins or would you recognize it as the colossal act of hypocrisy that it is?
dicentra, I think she has in mind the Marxist formulation, where labor is the only component of value (or nearly so), such that if I dig a big hole in my back yard for no purpose, said hole is worth precisely the same as one I’d dug for a septic tank, water line, or placer gold deposit.
“Hey, SFAG: who’s going to feed you if all the producers go away?”
Somebody who didn’t take a bonus with bailout money, I guess. Sort of the way it is now. Though it would be neat to have the AIG execs as servants, we could just eat them instead.
“Demonstrate why that isn’t correct or shove off.”
You should try googling on this topic.
“That collective farm thingie doesn’t work very well in practice, you know.”
Totally. Who would have thought that removing disincentives for poor performances would have led to poor performance?
“Meya – if we don’t pay the AIG bonuses, we’ll have government abrogating contracts and imposing bills of attainder, both of which are unconstitutional.”
Taxing bonuses doesn’t abrogate contracts. And its not a bill of attainder to pass a law that applies generally to the TARP program.
“So then Washington polls become OUTRAGED by the fact that AIG did what Congress said they could do.”
Maybe they didn’t quite understand the intent of the government on this one.
Somebody who didn’t take a bonus with bailout money, I guess.
You mean the ones that the Democratic Congress approved, and that your Lord and Savior, Teleprompter Jesus signed off on?
Those bonuses?
Nice spin, though.
Oh, sure. Just look at Europe if you don’t believe it.
And people cope. They also produce less.
Regards,
Ric
“You mean the ones that the Democratic Congress approved, and that your Lord and Savior, Teleprompter Jesus signed off on?”
Oh shit I forgot you think I’m an Obamabot. Sorry.
“Demonstrate why that isn’t correct or shove off.â€
You should try googling on this topic.
Ooo! A cop-out! I’m so impressed!
And intimidated!
meya is a good example of the left, I think. Clueless, and proud of it.
And people cope. They also produce less.
Meya: Tell me. Would all of the animals be better off if we rounded them up and stuck them in zoos? They’d have guaranteed meals, free healthcare (which they don’t get in the wild at all), protection from predators, and shelter from the elements.
What? They’re better off in the wild than being completely dependent on Their Betters?
The devil you say!
“Ooo! A cop-out! I”
you didn’t, did you? How long you think your bravado will last? Till you figure it out?
And people cope. They also produce less.
They sure do. About $14,000 less in annual GDP per capita.
Oh shit I forgot you think I’m an Obamabot.
I didn’t forget that you’re an incompetent liar.
Enlighten us, SFAG: who did you vote for?
Totally. Who would have thought that removing disincentives for poor performances would have led to poor performance?
Which of the AIG execs are getting bonuses for poor performances? Specifically. Who is it, how much was he paid, why does he not deserve it.
Translation: you’re going to dodge the question.
You are a mendacious liar, SFAG.
See you in a week, or the next time I feel like turning off TrollHammer for a bit.
Once they decide to make an income threshold over which I am unduly penalized, you can bet I will never go over it. I can live pretty simply if I have to.
It has struck me as a bit odd that so many people are so readily willing to assume that the employees getting the current round of retention bonuses at AIG are the self-same employees as sold the poison credit swaps to foreign banks and others some years ago. I don’t believe such assumptions are warranted. Smearing unknown people has gotten to be an awful habit on Capitol Hill, doesn’t mean we have to do it here too.
Ah, a beautiful example of what Jeff’s on about. In other words, that’s a lie and you’re a liar.
“Production” is anything that adds value. Labor is one of those things, but the single most productive activity on the planet is good management. A group of people, each doing whatever seems good at the moment, is not likely to produce much; under the control of a directive intelligence, they can work together toward a goal and produce ‘way more.
Another productive activity is arranging finances. We live in an industrial society; this means that the “means of production” are themselves produced — the difference between an iPod and an iPod factory is one of scale; in each case the materials have to be collected and assembled intelligently. We also live in a society that deprecates great wealth, so in order to build an iPod factory (or any other factory) it is necessary to collect the wherewithal in relatively small bits, small relative to the overall cost. That is the task of the financier; without their work, there are no “means of production”, so they themselves are productive.
It is an observed fact about the human race that if you don’t let productive people keep a good-sized portion of their own production for themselves, they simply reduce their production, perhaps to zero. You and your fellows have now declared that financiers are not productive enough to be rewarded for their production. The result will inevitably be that, except for a few dedicated individuals who are willing to work for nothing, the production will stop, or move elsewhere. (Much finance takes place nowadays in places like London, as it always has, plus the Caymans and other similar “havens” out of the reach of your ability to tax. Of course you can correct that if you study your Machiavelli closely.
And that’s not even counting dicentra’s point, which is that you and yours have just declared that an American contract is worthless. Welcome to the Third World.
Regards,
Ric
So you were referring to what jobs, specifically?
The CEO of AIG was asked who was in that CDS unit and was getting bonuses. He didn’t even know. Hopefully he’ll respond with some names and you can find out then.
I didn’t ask the CEO. I asked you. You are the one saying people are getting bonuses they didn’t earn, who are they and why are you saying this? Either you know something, or you are just making shit up. Which is it?
I think the likely assumption is that SFAG is making shit up. It’s a hobby of hers.
As is cutting and running when her latest bullshit opinion becomes untenable.
Or leaving little dingleberries appended to long dead posts, where they tend to go unanswered altogether due to inattention or boredom, thus taking on an appearance they don’t deserve.
But …But… Michelle’s arms !! Retard bowling ! Rush Limbaugh uses drugs !! Hope !! Change !! Unicorns !
Welcome to the Third World.
Exactly. That is a better response than my #21: you don’t have to imagine it, just visit any Third World country.
Neo-neocon is a smooth running engine of observation, reason and exacting analysis of Pres Obama the last couple of days. Check these two posts out for their bloggy goodness (and indecently, a reminder of what we miss now that the sharp eye of Dean Barnett has left us.)
“Ah, a beautiful example of what Jeff’s on about. In other words, that’s a lie and you’re a liar.”
It was a bit of a joke, which sort of punked dicentra, so it totally bombed.
“You and your fellows have now declared that financiers are not productive enough to be rewarded for their production.”
Oh just the ones that would fail without government money. You know, the ones that weren’t quite so productive. Some may even consider it destructive.
“You are the one saying people are getting bonuses they didn’t earn, who are they and why are you saying this?”
You can start with the people at the CDS unit getting bonuses. Sorry I’m as informed on this as the CEO.
Dicentra –
Heinlein and the Apple Pastry parable.
An apple has value. You can grow it and eat it. You can grow it and sell it. And you can even trade a dozen to the baker in return for an apple pie.
If the baker is a competent one, the apple pie made with his labor will be worth more than the apples alone. But if the baker is not, his lumpy, pasty attempt at pie, will be worth less than if you had just sold the apples as is.
In this, Heinlein refuted Marx’ claim that labor added value. Heinlein’s belief was that only competent and desirable labor added value; and therefore, a worker had no claim to wages based on an identity as a worker without any results to show from his labors.
i think.
Now Barney Frank wants to claw back the Fannie and Freddie bonuses, too.
I wonder if the definition of “bonus” includes all the loads he dumped into the boytoy he slotted into a management position (in addition to several …nonstandard…positions).
Labor is a commodity. It is bought and sold and traded like any other commodity.
If the government wanted to abrogate the contract they should have made AIG declare bankruptcy. Since the government is running the company, and signed the contracts in good faith it is legally bound to honor them or face suit.
Oh just the ones that would fail without government money. You know, the ones that weren’t quite so productive. Some may even consider it destructive.
You keep making this assertion, yet it seems to be totally fabricated. If you know someone getting a bonus now who doesn’t deserve it, please explain the circumstance to us, otherwise admit you are slandering people you don’t know with completely unfounded allegations.
You can start with the people at the CDS unit getting bonuses. Sorry I’m as informed on this as the CEO.
When did the CEO say they didn’t deserve the bonuses?
Imagine you are the CEO of a business, meya. Because of market forces and mismanagement, your auditors inform you that one of your branches is projected to lose $100 billion, possibly bankrupting the entire firm. You fire the boneheads and bring in some big guns, tell them you will give them 0.5% of anything less than $100 billion they lose. They work their asses off, and you only lose $50 billion. Do you think it would be outrageous to give them a $250 million dollar bonus?
meya, can you tell me the difference between a performance bonus and a retention bonus? If not, you can’t even have the first clue about what is going on here.
#52 Adriane
Starship Troopers, if I recall correctly, the estimable Mr. DuBois.
But why would you want to retain any of them SDN? AIG lost money, so everybody that works there obviously sucks. Just ask meya.
Clean up on isle 62.
Foad, thor.
If the tax goes into effect on all TARP participating firms, HR musical chairs will go into overdrive on Wall Street.
Those firms limited in their compensation structure by the TARP funds will lose waves of senior bankers (the dead wood has already been cut), impacting their ability to generate large investment banking fees and repay TARP funds. Expect to see several new investment banking firms pop-up to soak up the talent due to the lack of restriction. Bankers are mobile assets, and the highest paid bankers are valued for their rolodex…
For a little perspective, Senior Investment Bankers and Traders only get 5-20% of their annual compensation in salary. Whereas a CEO or CFO of a Fortune 500 company may receive$4+ million and $1 million in salary respectively and receive a 15-30% bonus at the end of great year, an M&A banker or trader has a salary of $150-250k and earn a bonus of $0 to $5+ million depending on the year.
I believe Goldman pays portfolio managers of internal trading capital 10% of the portfolios profits for the year… The numbers are huge, but so are the profits generated. Many of these traders could leave and set up a firm which earns 20% of the trading “ups”
Ever figure out how to correctly explain Derrida’s “dissemination,” Jeff?
AIG was setting up the bonus pool in march 2008, when these people could have left easily…
Poor thor, such a small, pathetic little man.
This is fucking unreal. You guys have your little internal klatsch; the rest of the nation is retching. Way to go, pigs.
Actually, Curbythor, I get production bonuses every quarter. For the last 11 years.
And there’s another reason to pay retention bonuses. Let’s say that you have an area of expert knowledge in a complex system. Could be financial, could be software. This doesn’t require you to have clients; just requires you to know how that system works. That knowledge is valuable. If only because it imposes a non-zero risk that without your knowledge, the system will go boom between the time you might leave and the time your proposed replacement actually has the knowledge to be a real replacement.
So the company says, “If you promise you will help us untangle this mess and figure out how to fix things, we will promise to pay you handsomely for that time you could have left in. If you actually leave, all bets are off.” Note that bonuses ostensibly offered for performance usually have that little hook in them too. If I am not working for the company when the bonus is paid, I don’t get it.
There are few things more difficult than to figure out how a system works when those who have built it aren’t there, and their knowledge hasn’t been captured. And that’s why it was worth it to AIG to keep these people around until the positions were unwound: they put them together; they can take them apart. Without playing Jenga with the capital markets.
Hey, cynn, you don’t have to read this site. In fact, since you contribute nothing to the discourse except drunken ranting, why don’t you find somewhere else to go?
cynn, are your kids going to volunteer for the TeleprompterJugend or wait to be drafted?
Still waiting to hear why I’m “greedy” for owning a modest house on which I can make the payments.
After they’re in, either way, you might want to cut back on the box wine.
You wouldn’t want them overhearing one of your little rants and reporting you to the authorities.
Fuck you Spies how long have you been here?
About 5 minutes.
Going to answer my question, cynn?
Did you see the other thread about Obama’s little mandatory “volunteer” organization?
Are your kids going to join or wait to be drafted?
And why am I “greedy”?
Pigs? You’re the idiot who voted for this catastrophe, cynn. Try not to project so much.
Enough so that I taught it and then argued against it at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory both times I was accepted as a fellow. And enough so that I had (somewhere here) an entire academic paper that covered intentionalism as it applied to everyone from Gadamer to Barthes to Eco to Culler to Derrida to Fish to Butler.
You?
Going to go to your local Two Minutes Hate tomorrow, cynn? Going to sign the fascist loyalty oath when they come to your door?
You probably should. You might build up some brown-nosing points for later.
Tinker to Evers to Chance, here.
Well-well, look who awoke!
You write “he’s a good cat” on the chalk board in class. Ask the students to agree on the definition of each term and the signifier, the signified and the referent. Everyone agrees the sentence describes a fluffy animal. But not when a beatnik poet is describing another poet.
Using the obvious and agreed upon where they disseminate into differing meanings is how Derrida makes his case. It’s not merely the highly contextualized or homonym which would is expected to have differing meanings and, furthermore, Derrida points to words with opposite meanings such as pharmakon.
Two persons writing the same sentence with differing referents is the preferred example was my point.
Tell me now wrong I am.
Gadamer to Barthes to Eco to Culler to Derrida to Fish to Butler
Team Thor’s Double-Play Tandem.
Funny, I use the cat / beatnik example all the time to make the case for how intention grows language, not convention.
Two persons writing sentences with different referents aren’t writing the same sentence. They are writing sentences that look the same and sound the same. But changing the referent changes the sign. Changing the sign changes the meaning. Sentences that look the same but have been differently signified are different texts.
I don’t need to talk about Mallarme’ to identify Derrida’s privileging of the signifier and of convention. I’ve already argued why that’s wrong. How about you do the work and argue where I’m wrong?
Or better yet, why don’t you go read through my back and forth with Therstititties and tell me where I’m wrong, because he tried the same kind of thing a few years back.
I’m not here to rewrite this stuff every time someone wants to take issue. If you have a problem with my argument, first make sure you know it, then deal with how I’ve handled arguments similar to those you believe yourself to be raising. This isn’t new to me. Name dropping doesn’t impress me. Neologisms generally bore me. And no, I don’t need to read Derrida in the original French.
If your knowledge is some sort of intellectual capital then they’d handcuff you with stock since the value of you intellectual capital would increase the stock price.
Credit default swaps are insurance. There’s nothing un-American nor that complicated or unseemly or bad about writing risk insurance. But it will blow the lid off a insurance company if they’re writing said insurance with premiums that are at a severe discount to the actual risk when that risk hits. Simple. And.That’s.What.Happened. They sold too much too cheaply.
Do you get a production bonus when your company is losing money? The theory is everyone suffers when the company is losing money and everyone benefits when it’s making money. It ain’t a union.
Company loses $100 million if I stay. Company loses $10 billion if I leave. Should I receive a retention bonus? How much should it be?
If AIG unwinds badly and the entire US economy is sent into a depression because I left due to death threats and Congress taxing away my bonus how much am I worth to keep on the job?
I think we’re living in Georgie Soros’ wet dream.
I read your syllabus but like much of what I read my ability to retain and recall limits me, which leaves me wide open to accusations of jargon abuse! It’s that I recall Derrida being explained the “good cat” way and not with two persons stating two different contextualized sentences. I’m not in a position to lecture you nor do I necessarily disagree with you. I learned Lit theory because I had to and not because I cared so much for Derrida, et al. I may try to argue his case as it seems to be sound academic theory, but I’m a bystander to your Saussure versus Derrida death match. It’s all good to know, if you ask me, but I see no end or extreme value to it. It depends on how you look at it.
Foucault was the most enjoyable read and a sound nutter in my opinion. Don’t make me reach for my Foucault. I might go there! “Madness is defined by discourse of normality.” Love that line.
Bada-bing, bada- bang, bada-thqrt.
…
Ick.
rush-pocka-limbopucka, sheditto-sucka.
[…]
guingenius-nada
[…]
Poo.
No sudden moves, people, he’s packing an MFA !
Me? I’m packing an Ernie Banks autograph “Big-Scoop.”
Eduard Limonov tags the hot snapper.
Seems you could figure out why a fascist, racist, Communist pulls it while you sit around impressing politically and economically thoughtless hicks.
Move on. Fucking Chevillard’s daughter beats arguing with him.
Do you get a production bonus when your company is losing money? The theory is everyone suffers when the company is losing money and everyone benefits when it’s making money.
Really? At my company the theory is you try to hang on to the talent when times get tough. I get quarterly bonuses based on my performance, the rest of the company doesn’t have shit to do with it.
It ain’t a union.
Precisely.
You are a stone cold stud, Bmoe.
Are you into child brides? Maybe you’ll get offered Willow Palin as a quarterly bonus. Child brides are total fuck yeahs!
Just don’t be conceiving no babies in sin, hear. Marry the bitch right and don’t let Willow name yall’s kids Everclear, Chodesworth, Ephedrine, Glock, F-150 or Snowmachine.
God Bless.
A. Nergo Bmoe, that’s what I’d name if it’s a boy.
bada thor, it might be hard to handcuff someone with stock when the current price is headed through the floor and the future management is the US government led by Democrats, which kind of guarantees it. Anyone with brains (which leaves you out) is going to want contractually obligated cash. These guys’ mistake was in not recognizing that a Dumborat run US has far less honor than a Mafia boss.
Oh, and actually, I have gotten a bonus even when the company has been losing money. Not as much, since they want to encourage me to be a team player, but I still get some, because they want to reward those who are sticking to the job and helping right the ship.
That you don’t understand this just tells me that the Pointy Haired Boss is your role model.
The whole thing reminds me of William Gaddis’s “J.R.”. Like that was where the lefties learned about economics. If you haven’t read it, don’t bother.
Excellent,Jeff.
Aside from all the creepy Bananna Republic-y aspects to this, I cannot get over how once again the lefties use the rhetoric of the gross sum involved(165 million zillion dollars!)and then apply their venom to HHI’s of $250K. Why are they so pathologically incapable of resisting the urge to inflame people based on the imagery of “the greedy CEO” when its always about punishing high skill, high value people further down the food chain? It perfectly sums up their mentality about taxes in general.
You are a stone cold stud, Bmoe.
Are you into child brides? Maybe you’ll get offered Willow Palin as a quarterly bonus. Child brides are total fuck yeahs!
LARRY CRAIG!
CELINE!
DERIVATIVES!
I was expected you to regale us with tales of your career as an investment banker thor, what happened?
Couldn’t find your copy of Three Boys and a Portfolio?
You write “he’s a good cat†on the chalk board in class. Ask the students to agree on the definition of each term and the signifier, the signified and the referent. Everyone agrees the sentence describes a fluffy animal. But not when a beatnik poet is describing another poet.
They are both really writing about me. Shut up.
I think I’m qualified to answer that, Abe, since I was one of those highly skilled high-value Wall Street people of your milky wet dreams who is now a Marxist-Leftist Obamabot.
If these CEO’s and “highly skilled” spoke in Lit theory lingua our Lady of Peace (sorry, but they’re in my earbuds), Jeff Goldstein, would want nothing more than to kick the ever loving shit out of these fuckheads. He’d see right through their bullshit. But, and as is consistent with his failing of intellectual rigor, he hasn’t a fuckin’ clue as to what these people do and/or did. He’s, like you, too goddamned intellectually lazy to figure it out as well, to pierce the lingua they cloak and armor themselves in.
You’re a bunch of born and bred dumbfocks, SDN, Abe Froman, et al; you’re the easy marks. So it’s Jeff and the Jeffs like him that piss me off, fuckin’ lazy fucks, intellectual cowards, squished Twinkies.
Do you want to know what a retention bonus is, seeing how it’s obvious you haven’t a clue and Jeff, in his infinite Protein Wisdom, deleted a basic explanation I posted earlier? It’s a waste of money, a Communist’s way of dumping the company’s equity out the back door to his apparatchiks, it’s structuring inflated salaries as debt, which inflates book value, if you know accounting tricks.
The true Banana Republic aspect of all this AIG chicanery is the selling of it to the easy marks, the Abe Froman’s, the illiterate fuckheads on the street, the Darleens, who are capable of interpreting only stick figure symbolism.
What do you cowards not get about AIG going tits up three days after Lehman Bro.s went tits up? AIG sold enough credit default insurance against Lehman’s debt to implode their house, dumbasses, and they owed the contraparties – Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Banco Santandar, etc.. – billions that they couldn’t pay. Are you fuckin’ that stupid? AIG was an insurance company that sold hundreds of billions of worthless insurance, idiots. Smart, highly skilled, educated men of insurance don’t misprice by hundreds of billions the default risk that they are insuring against if they are smart, highly skilled and/or educated.
Now if AIG doesn’t pay it’d ripple through and collapse the world’s banking system because those banks need that money AIG is on the hook for.
GET IT, yet, you “duuuuuh” squawking rethuglidum fuckheads?
If AIG wasn’t using our money as grease they’d be flinging those “highly skilled” financial product specialists out to the curb on Broad street. But fuck it, so many are buying their “highly skilled” bullshit still. The Jeffs have yet to figure it out.
He’s focused on his silly paranoia and the party hat effect it has on the hick legion.
Fuck you is now complete.
“Whereas a CEO or CFO of a Fortune 500 company may receive$4+ million and $1 million in salary respectively and receive a 15-30% bonus at the end of great year, an M&A banker or trader has a salary of $150-250k and earn a bonus of $0 to $5+ million depending on the year.”
Do they really ever earn a bonus of 0?
I start from a simple formulation. Without TARP, their bonus would be 0. With TARP, now they’re getting 10% of their bonus.
I think the disagreements here come from differing views as to how TARP should function. Some in the administration and this blog seem to think that it’s a fund to basically cover all the losses and make these entities profitable again. Others, and I include myself in this, think its a fund to preserve liquidity and wind down these companies forcing loss realization upon shareholders and some of the creditors. In this way, healthy and productive units leaving the company is consistent with winding down the company.
The problem with noting thor’s deep psychological problems is that its like pointing at a lime and screaming “GREEN FRUIT!!!” as though your revelation has unlocked the secrets of the universe. Its still more fun than that though.
#100
The welfare check must have arrived. Our loss.
You’re confusing a production bonus with a retention bonus, Meya. Retention bonuses are multi-year contracts that are usually paid in full upfront (the cash portion, anyway) and structured as a forgivable loan which gets a percentage forgiven annually until the end of the contract where the employee’s debt becomes zero. The multi-year aspect of the contract makes them hard to renegotiate.
The one thing I assume is that some on the derivative desk and in credit defaults at AIG know AIG’s hand in the game of poker that AIG is now forced to play. AIG doesn’t want them walking out and working for the contraparties who AIG is negotiating against to buy back (unwind) their default insurance.
In other words AIG doesn’t want some of its employees to go to the competition and reveal exactly how fucked AIG is and specifically where they are fucked the most. Sad, but true.
Rusty
his hatred of people who actually have accomplished things in life is evident with his indecent projections and ..no..not a government welfare check … just his allowance from daddy & mommy.
The problem with you is you’re simply a fuckin’ stupid loser. When I said Barack Obama was going to win early on I was analyzing the outcome for the sake of getting it right.
When I said to buy certain stocks two weeks ago I meant they were so cheap the odds were way too heavy in favor of the buyer. I was attempting to get it right, meaning no fuckin’ way could certain companies be aquired at what the market was quoting their market caps at. Silly little fuckheads like you screamed and pooted in your diapers squeaking on about what Obama said was causing the market to decline, which makes no sense whatsoever.
You’re a pussy-ass follower wishing to fit in with some gang of like-minded broke-dick victims, Abe, and most likely always have been.
I usually have an clue about which I speak. You and your ilk, not so much.
Play the game to win. Popularity is for cheerleaders.
And you live in your daughter’s attic and beg for coins on Santa Monica Ave, Duuuuh-Dar.
Stupid cow squints and bellows out lies to ease her pangs of uselessness and cowardice.
My Dad wasn’t a broke-dick scrapplin’ loser, Darleen, nor am I, and that must burn your cow holes to no end. My Dad has an accounting degree and a engineering degree and financially successful children, yours? Hahaha.
I’m happy to have inspired paragraphs of monosyllabic thoughtvomit from you thorry. Everyone enjoys an internet tough guy, especially when he’s so clearly mouthing along to his keyboard tappage with an overly effeminate lisp.
thor,
It seems like you really know a lot about this stuff. I am sure I could learn a lot from your experience. But your attitude sucks. If everyone here is ignorant, why not try to remedy that?
Not everyone one in the world is operating in bad faith you know.
peace dude
Because these cheap intellects do nothing but insult anyone over dumbassed politics.
I voted for Barack Obama. For that I must pay!
But I don’t hand out mercy.
I won.
Thor your politics are quite secondary to the Asperger’s Syndrome (or whatever you suffer from) as to why you’re relentlessly mocked here.
Well, ok then.
You could try killin’ em with kindness? Be the better man?
It just seems like a waste.
Yeah, thor has a lot of knowledge about the ins and outs of all of this.
If he ever figured out what Jeff and some others were driving at, he might be able to lose the Syndrome — not Aspberger’s; more Tourette’s — that makes him so hard to take.
Please note that there are a lot of people out there who are not connected to AIG but are watching this with great interest. They’re needed; at some point the system has to be unwound into failures and, if not successes, at least survivors, and somebody’s going to have to spend money paying for the survivors. Meya and company have now announced that if such people are successful — that is, if they make any money on the deal — they’ll be vilified and the money taken away, regardless of law or existing contracts. What do you reckon the chances are that they’re going to co-operate?
Never mind. Badguys must be punished, right? And the privilege of identifying the badguys belongs to the winners.
Regards,
Ric
I could, P.J., but I’m convinced most are the fodder that always gets victimized from the inequities of the very capitalism to which they pretend to worship.
They owe it to themselves to understand the basics of American business and to learn to recognize and evaluate opportunities that present themselves. Freedom to do so is what makes this country great. Maybe it’s the work that they’re afraid of because it requires some work, who is to say for sure. They make excuses when they should be making money.
You get to vote for the President every four years. Once a winner is decided you add changes to Fed policy and tax policy into your analysis and get back to work. The market continues without a care for the noise the hyperventilating losers blow out their holes. Relevant information is the focus and the job is to use it to legally take money from others whenever and wherever you can. In America everyone is allowed to play the game and the losers can came back to the table more knowledgeable from their previous not-so profitable experiences.
Those who don’t understand the game and its rules are not high on my list of concerns. Let them throw their punches at imaginary socialists and communists and swing their fists in the air because the world is beyond their control. What am I to do but laugh at them and remind them of their folly?
thor,
I may disagree with some of your premises about how one makes money in the U.S., but I appreciate your comments. It is my impression that the people that come to this website are, for the most part, interested in learning, and exchanging information and opinions.
Not that you should in any way be required to inform anyone of anything, but it seems like you could bring a lot to the table.
Maybe most people wouldn’t get it, but some might. I mean think how long Jeff has been arguing about intent / meaning. Most people still don’t get it. But many do eventually come around.
You agree with Foucault then. And that’s scary.
110
Because these cheap intellects do nothing but insult anyone over dumbassed politics.
I voted for Barack Obama. For that I must pay!
Oh. No. For that we all pay. it only shows, as smart as you may think you are, you don’t pay attention.
But I don’t hand out mercy.
Nobody asked for any.
I won.
Of course you did! You so badly needed to.
Theres a good boy. run along.
In other words AIG doesn’t want some of its employees to go to the competition and reveal exactly how fucked AIG is and specifically where they are fucked the most. Sad, but true.
Oh, I see. So we should tell these employees to take a hike and let them go to the competition so AIG will have a much harder time recovering and paying back our money. Your genius overwhelms, thor.
I voted for Barack Obama. For that I must pay!
I don’t give a fuck you voted for, I don’t like you because you are a ignorant lying prick.
I have no problem with Jeff and semiotics. I don’t think he’s correct to attack other academics but that’s his business.
He’s got style but he needs to work on the production of texts which will sell and garner him a legitimate audience. It’s why I sent him a few books of masculine hard-edged others to read and chuckle at. They don’t salute Limonov because he first flogged them with politics. He made ’em laugh and relate to his crazed concepts first. I’m one of you through story came first. It ain’t easy but Jeff seems capable if he’d get busy.
I met Edichka-baby first in an empty office early on a Saturday morning. He was there before I was and was working. He works his ass off. People forget that.
You know, being thor-free for a while was nice.
Now we’re back to everyone allowing this loser to waste their time.
Sigh.
No, but HTML doesn’t include an <irony> tag.
The populist outrage currently being evoked is stupid and ridiculous. Yes, you (and meya et al) are quite correct that a lot of people who are at best incompetent and at worst active saboteurs are gonna get a lot of money out of this. But what you’re trying for is the financial equivalent of a perpetual motion machine — you’re pretending that you can get all the friction out of the system, and then it will run forever. Ain’t gonna happen. There are always grifters and stooges, and there will always be grifters and stooges. You can’t get rid of them; the only thing you can do is work around them, and try to give them the fewest possible opportunities.
Grifters depend on distorting the system, taking advantage of loopholes to their own benefit. It’s the same principle as the Rightist outrage, some years ago, over “welfare cheats”. Yes, they existed (and still exist), but the measures put into place to penalize them or stop them from doing their thing cost an order of magnitude more than they can steal. It ain’t cost effective to wipe them out completely — again, it’s trying for perpetual motion. The same is true here. The malfeasors at AIG shouldn’t get any money, but the measures necessary to keep them from profiting have knock-on effects that will cost ‘way out of proportion to any benefit they yield.
Regards,
Ric
Ric, all retention bonus contracts have non-compete clauses. It’s that they are seldom enforced and/or difficult to enforce, or should I say costly to enforce.
The nut and bolts have a lot less to do with populist narratives than legal reality.
If there is any metanarrative to be read and interpreted from AIG it’s the deregulate and trust them to do what’s right by there shareholders fallacy. As I’ve stated before, if Greenspan is up to admitting the fallacy then why aren’t the relentless redumbtards listening to him?
Noncompete clauses are window dressing. If they’re going to be effective, they’re at least as expensive as any “retention bonus” would be. The guy involved has knowledge. You can either pay him to use it, or pay him not to use it — but you have to pay for it, regardless. If you don’t hand him the cash, the “pay” happens in indirect and almost always damaging ways.
As for regulation, you appear to have mistaken me for a Libertarian. Many libertarian concepts have value as ways to understand what’s going on, but that’s at best at the sophomore level — it’s more complicated than that in the real world.
Regulation is necessary.
The question then becomes, what is the goal of the regulations? If the goal of the regulations is to keep things running smoothly by providing information and more-or-less-equal access to it while preventing the worst excesses, that’s one thing, and the sort of regulation it seems to me Greenspan and others are proposing.
But if the goal of the regulation is “make it come out the way I want, for social justice and benefit of minorities, and keep anybody from stealing, and I get to define ‘stealing'” — it ain’t gonna work. All real mechanical systems have friction; all real financial systems have grifters and opportunists, and any real financial system the size of ours is going to allow both goodguys and badguys to come up with amounts of money that generate envy in those who haven’t got access to the Money River. Ginning up populist outrage over what happens out at the three- and four-sigma level is just going to compress the curve, and push the median down so that everybody loses.
Regards,
Ric
Actually, Ric, in my experience, noncompete clauses are stunningly ineffective. First, it’s extraordinarily difficult to write one that isn’t instantly unenforceable as essentially forbidding the signer from making a living, which courts won’t enforce. Second, especially given the collaboration tools available today, the employee can actually be working on the project while assigned to one totally different from anywhere in the world. And finally, I’ve seen clients resolve the situation by telling Old Employer, “Look, we want this person’s talents available; if you don’t come up with a way to let that happen, we’ll be happy to yank the contract from you, award it to New Employer, and go on from there.” It rarely ends well.
Agreed.
Past your goal interpretation, why aren’t there regulations on derivatives and credit default swaps sold by AIG?
A $60-billion Wall-Street-Lehman-Bro.s problem turned into a trillion dollar entire banking system domino knock down how?
The Fed can only regulate federally chartered banks. Think maybe it’s time to update the system sans your political theory of correct social policy and strictly with regard to risk to the sytem yet?
That you’d even bring that up proves your shaded political goggles are always on. The market never cares who the President is nor what the variations in reasonable tax rates are, it cares about transparency, that the same rules apply to all and that there’s a overall level playing field for all players to engage in the business of making a trading profit. It’s purely about the opportunity to make money. Everyone has the same President and the same tax rate to pay, those are equals.
Wall Street firms are bound by arbitration agreements with each other. If one firm wants to enforce a non-compete against another firm then the party violating the non-compete asks for the price to pay for the non-compete to go away. They usually have it figured out before the hire takes place and if not then the dispute gets a fairly quick arbitration decision and is paid off in the arbitration award. It’s fairly systematic and calculated.
unnnh — could it possibly be because the people responsible for coming up with regulations were too busy ginning up pseudo-populist crap like Sarbanes-Oxley to pay any attention? Or because the people who were raking it in under the existing regime were also making “campaign contributions” to the people who were supposed to set up the regulations? Or possibly — just possibly — that the regulation-writers were so focused on “social justice” that they couldn’t get interested in anything resembling a level playing field?
There’s a critical mass effect. When there get to be so many regulations that it becomes impossible to hack through the thicket, people stop paying much attention to anything other than appearances. On top of that, there’s my main point — there’s no such thing as a regulatory regime that will stop all the opportunists; trying to establish one just ends up with contradictory, unsatisfactory, and ineffective regulations. That’s especially true when (as is the current case) the regulation writers don’t know anything about what they’re trying to regulate, so depend on staffers and advisors and don’t know who’s advising, bribing, and/or blackmailing the staffers and advisers.
Regards,
Ric
Or like Phil Gramm and his slant-eyed wife who were raking it in from Enron and the moneyed class of social engineers?
So many regulations it’s a thicket! So focused on social engineering! Give me a fuckin’ break. And they engineered you where?
Between valid points you’re still all about political battles which you don’t benefit from.
Ric, this is a side topic. Remember I worked in Russia? Russians then were suspicious of other Russians who made lots of money. For the most part they were correct. Persons that made money then were mostly corrupt whores, but I met plenty that weren’t, who made every penny honestly and with integrity.
You don’t think it’s occurred to me that the opposite is true here? They see some scumbag like Donald Trump and Americans think the opposite way, that he must be smart, that he must be skilled, that since he’s rich he must have done something to be deserving of such.
Just a observation.
Thank you Jeff for allowing me to opportunity to donkey punch your legions on this scalable platform of your entrepreneurship.
Now I shall be gone.
Once more, why is anyone bothering with the Talking Anus?
“and his slant-eyed wife”
Hey Jeff, what do you make of that little bon mot?
Eff you lawyering trigger puller and eff you goat-stupid hickbilly.
Love it or leave it. Canada will warm up in a month or so. One way tickets are cheap, walking is cheaper still. Be the hockey puck, Danny.
I’m goner now even more than I was when I was originally gone, you inflamed, nasty, unwashed twats that must look like old tossed away apricots or prunes or something I wouldn’t poke with a stick.
Now I shall be gone.
Patthorico !!!
guinsPen – maybe there could be a three way competition between the Trustifarian, Kate and Patrick… who quits here the mostest!!
You know, I was gonna roll on thor, but then I got to where he sent Jeff G “masculine hard-edged” books and now I just can’t stop giggling. Ah.
133
Write when you find work.
Eff you lawyering trigger puller and eff you goat-stupid hickbilly.
I wish I had me a Master of Fine Arts so I could write all pretty like that.