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Why liberals are retarded too...

post #1 of 19
2/10/10 at 12:39pm
Thread Starter 
Front page on HuffPo.

Seriously guys, can we back the fuck off for a moment and save the outrage for where it matters?

You're talking about two of the only CEOs worth a damn on Wall Street, their bonuses were much smaller than previous years, and the bonuses were in stock. Meaning they're tied to performance. Can we pick our battles, please?
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post #2 of 19
2/10/10 at 1:12pm
It's kind of a valid school of thought that these guys should get nothing extra, performance-motivated or not. They've had a LOT of government money, so taking large cash grabs, in whatever form, is in massively bad taste. Them being decent guys or good businessman personally has nothing to do with it.
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post #3 of 19
2/10/10 at 1:13pm
Quote:
Listen, $17 million is an extraordinary amount of money. Of course, there are some baseball players who are making more than that who don't get to the World Series either. So I'm shocked by that as well.
What? This is a terrible analogy. Albert Pujols didn't make it to the World Series and he deserves every penny of his 14 million dollar salary.


As far as I'm concerned, as long as these banks repayed their TARP loans, they can pay their CEO's whatever they wish. It's up to the government not to stop the size of the bonuses, but to stop the banks from keeping their "too big to fail" moniker. These ideas aren't intertwined and in my opinion, exclusive from one another.
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post #4 of 19
2/10/10 at 1:17pm
Just to clarify, a stock-based bonus is worthless if your company's bottom line loses value.

So...not a cash grab.
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post #5 of 19
2/10/10 at 1:26pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by JuddL View Post
Front page on HuffPo.

Seriously guys, can we back the fuck off for a moment and save the outrage for where it matters?

You're talking about two of the only CEOs worth a damn on Wall Street, their bonuses were much smaller than previous years, and the bonuses were in stock. Meaning they're tied to performance. Can we pick our battles, please?
Agreed. Sometimes the left just takes on some really dumb shit that should be ignored or at the very least put on a backburner while bigger issues take the forefront.
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post #6 of 19
2/10/10 at 2:56pm
Oh please, you give me zero interest taxpayer money to invest in risky high yielding bets and no rules on how much I can usuriously price gouge my trapped customers and an utterly denuded system of taxation for this echelon of business and I'll show you huge profits and give myself a giant bonus too.

These guys are douchebags but I've always felt the bonuses thing is sickening but it's a symptom of the lack of trust busting, favorable tax policies and grossly inadequate regulation.

But if you want to focus on the bonuses, it's a simple math problem. Look at the financial crisis and the trillions of theoretical debt hovering at the edge of a potentially catastrophic precipice, as opposed to any other time, then look at a chart of Wall Street bonuses as compared to any other time. These two charts tell the whole story.

But, JuddL, I have to ask you, all the people to stick up for, you choose Blankfein and Dimon?
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post #7 of 19
2/10/10 at 3:02pm
The point isn't that people who do their job well don't get to paid what the market can affort. The point is that the pay structure shouldn't be arranged in such a way that it encourages them to make short-sighted and risky business decisions that help the immediate financial position of the company but hurt the long term stability.

It's not really my job to decide if the people who own a company think that those in charge of it should get paid a large amount of money, that's their choice. It's our job to make sure that the system doesn't encourage a smash and grab philosophy that will end up screwing over everyone like it did in the lending market.

By tying bonuses to things like longer term stock-based programs it seems like you might start to address CEO's who try to make a bunch of money for a year or two and then bolt/fired and have giant golden parachutes.
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post #8 of 19
2/10/10 at 3:13pm
If these banks still owed TARP funds, I can see a legitimate state interest (to steal a phrase from the Supreme Court for a second) in curbing bonuses for these CEOs.

However, both Goldman and JP Morgan Chase have paid the full amount of the TARP funds that were given to them.

The federal government has NO right to force corporations to pay certain funds for their workers.

You can bitch about this stuff all you want (even I think it's a tad crazy) but the government has no say so in what private sector industries pay their workers.
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post #9 of 19
2/10/10 at 3:17pm
But the government has long had the right to regulate interstate and international business.
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post #10 of 19
2/10/10 at 3:20pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by dontEATnachos View Post
But the government has long had the right to regulate interstate and international business.
Of course they do. That doesn't mean they have the ability to regulate maximum pay.

Can you produce any evidence that the government has that ability?
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post #11 of 19
2/10/10 at 3:23pm
I'm not saying they should specify maximum pay, I'm saying that they could possibly have the ability to regulate the way that pay is structured.
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post #12 of 19
2/10/10 at 3:28pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by dontEATnachos View Post
I'm not saying they should specify maximum pay, I'm saying that they could possibly have the ability to regulate the way that pay is structured.
If Congress passed a law regulating maximum pay for private sector companies, that law would be ripped apart by the Supreme Court under a strict scrutiny test applied to a Commerce Clause analysis.
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post #13 of 19
2/10/10 at 3:36pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompoussory Estoppel View Post
If these banks still owed TARP funds, I can see a legitimate state interest (to steal a phrase from the Supreme Court for a second) in curbing bonuses for these CEOs.

However, both Goldman and JP Morgan Chase have paid the full amount of the TARP funds that were given to them.

The federal government has NO right to force corporations to pay certain funds for their workers.

You can bitch about this stuff all you want (even I think it's a tad crazy) but the government has no say so in what private sector industries pay their workers.
As long as the Fed refuses to disclose which institutions have received the billions upon billions of backdoor bailouts we'll never know if they've paid fully or not. My suspicion is that Goldman and Chase are in there and have a tidy racket going on.

But I have to ask: of all the injustice going on in the world, what possesses you to want to defend these guys even from an editorial on the Huffington Post?
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post #14 of 19
2/10/10 at 3:37pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompoussory Estoppel View Post
If Congress passed a law regulating maximum pay for private sector companies, that law would be ripped apart by the Supreme Court under a strict scrutiny test applied to a Commerce Clause analysis.
Nobody's asking for that. We've had no real investigation and no indictments on this financial meltdown. There's a huge difference between what these guys have done and what your average private sector company does. It's a false comparison that's used to shelter possibly criminal shenanigans by the banking industry.
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post #15 of 19
2/10/10 at 4:40pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by yt View Post
But I have to ask: of all the injustice going on in the world, what possesses you to want to defend these guys even from an editorial on the Huffington Post?
yt, no snark here, but you missed the point of both the editorial and my post. I was defending Obama, not the CEOs. I think there is a legitimate issue to be had with CEO pay, but liberals, particularly ones with voices, ought to be more careful about the battles they choose. Even if legitimate, this one in particular is a minor, and pretty weak one.

These kinds of complaints do more harm than good.
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post #16 of 19
2/10/10 at 4:50pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by JuddL View Post
yt, no snark here, but you missed the point of both the editorial and my post. I was defending Obama, not the CEOs. I think there is a legitimate issue to be had with CEO pay, but liberals, particularly ones with voices, ought to be more careful about the battles they choose. Even if legitimate, this one in particular is a minor, and pretty weak one.

These kinds of complaints do more harm than good.
I don't understand how. To me, it seems that the more the lid is pried off the incestuous Washington/Wall Street dealings, the better. I want a major investigation, open hearings and ultimately indictments.

I love Obama. I still support him and believe he has a very, very tough if not impossible job to do considering the state of our political system. But I believe he is wrong to let these guys slide the way he is. Now, he could have a long-term strategy that I'm not aware of, but what it looks like now (and what some are suggesting) is that this statement is a direct result of the Citizens United ruling and the recent news about Wall Street abandoning Democrats and throwing money at Republicans because Republicans aren't taking them on, and Obama appears to be.
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post #17 of 19
2/10/10 at 6:12pm
Krugman:

Quote:
Oh. My. God.

First of all, to my knowledge, irresponsible behavior by baseball players hasn’t brought the world economy to the brink of collapse and cost millions of innocent Americans their jobs and/or houses.

And more specifically, not only has the financial industry has been bailed out with taxpayer commitments; it continues to rely on a taxpayer backstop for its stability. Don’t take it from me, take it from the rating agencies:

The planned overhaul of US financial rules prompted Standard & Poor’s to warn on Tuesday it might downgrade the credit ratings of Citigroup and Bank of America on concerns that the shake-up would make it less likely that the banks would be bailed out by US taxpayers if they ran into trouble again.

The point is that these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state. There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private. And at the very least, you would think that Obama would understand the importance of acknowledging public anger over what’s happening. link.
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post #18 of 19
2/10/10 at 6:14pm
Good thing it was the CEO's of BofA and Citi we were talking about here.

Oh, wait...
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post #19 of 19
2/11/10 at 9:07pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompoussory Estoppel View Post
However, both Goldman and JP Morgan Chase have paid the full amount of the TARP funds that were given to them.
I didn’t realize TARP was the only emergency government assistance program these institutions benefited from.

Though, sarcasm aside, Congress didn’t attach any strings to the wheelbarrows of cash they sent Wall Street’s way, so I don’t see why liberals should be angry at the banks over this. Banks are private corporations, the only people they need to answer to—with regards to CEO compensation—are their shareholders.

If liberals want to blame anyone, they should blame Congress for passing out blank checks and asking for nothing in return.
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