Recent Comments

• Roland Hesz on AIG to Pay Millions To Top Workers Yes, I heard it a few times too - no christmas bonus. Most of the time the question of bonus never arose in the first place. On the other hand the bonus for me is above my salary. For sales people it is not. Their base salary is pretty low to motivate them. I get your argument, we have a difference of opinions in this case I'm afraid :)
• John Sinteur on AIG to Pay Millions To Top Workers If I had a dollar for every time I heard a company say "the past year has been very bad, there will be no christmas bonus this year" I could buy you enough beer to discuss this all evening long. Why would these guys be any different? Their company is so close to bankruptcy, they have to borrow billions. I stand by my statement.
• Roland Hesz on AIG to Pay Millions To Top Workers I guess if you got part of your salary as bonus, you would say it now: oh, sure, I worked hard, turned out profit, delivered a couple succesful projects, but as others did not, I don't want all of my salary. Don't forget that a big part of the salary of sales people is counted as a performance bonus, and these are the people who can pull the company out of the shit it's in. They are "rewarding" - i.e. giving the agreed upon salary - to the people who actually turned in some profit. If you divide the sum of the bonuses ($503 million) with the number of receivers (6000+) it turns out that they will get $83833.33 on average. That is not a "luxurious" bonus. If you say that's equivalent of 6 months basic salary, then you end up with around $240k per year. You can say it's a lot, but it's not a huge salary at this level. Of course, there will be those who got $50k as a bonus, and those who got $300k. Thing is "performance" bonus is like the tip for the waiters here. It is part of their salary. And not a small part. And this defence comes from a guy who never had any bonuses so far.
• John Sinteur on Big Three CEOs Flew Private Jets to Plead for Public Funds Gates didn't make his $40b as "compensation in the form of wages or options". He's co-founder, and he saw his initial stock package explode in value. So yes, I'm counting stock grants and stock options - here in the NL stock options are already taxed as income, so there's no problem counting them as income. What I'm not counting is capital gains on stuff people already own, like stock. Just count the stock options at the moment of issue as income, and if converted to stock you never look at it again. I don't think Bill Gates made all that much in salary, and it's not fair to count a rise in stock price against him.
• Maarten on Big Three CEOs Flew Private Jets to Plead for Public Funds Presumably you're counting stock grants and stock options in that 12X? How do you work with stock that's awarded now but vests and attains its value later? How do you deal with someone like Gates, making billions as the part-owner of a very successful company? Note that Msft actually shared a lot of wealth down the ranks, even if they denied it to some (the "permatemps"), but few made 1/12th of Gates' one-time $40bln.
• John Sinteur on UK citizens ready for biometrics The only thing the average banking industry executive has not trouble grasping is bailout money... or should that be "grabbing"?
• Bankman on UK citizens ready for biometrics As long as the average banking industry executive has trouble grasping the concept, I have little hope for the general public.
• John Z on Consider This…The Stupidest Exercise Machine You’ll Ever See This reminds me of Fred Flintstone and his car.
• Sue W on Once upon a time… er...lovely child, but what sensible person would put makeup on someone that age?
• Sue W on Sine Wave speech Amazing!
• Our Paul on February 2009 Change what the Marine is saying to: "Sir, the President is now in The Hague and will not be available for some time to come" and I will join the Marines if they offer me that job!!!!
• Mark on AIG to Pay Millions To Top Workers So many times in my career I was told the reason that the execs got the big bucks was as a reward for the huge responsibility placed on their shoulders and as a reflection of how well the company was doing. So many times I was told the reason for the single digit % raises for folks at my level were reflections of performance. Their never seems to be any accountability at exec levels for "performance" when a company goes down the toilet.
• doug on Patterns, Land Use Its interesting how Blue states follow the Mississippi River.
• Sue W on Dead Parrot sketch ancestor found Haha! Although in fact the person who wrote this book was interviewed on CBC Radio's "As It Happens" and said something to the effect that these jokes weren't the same at all. The joke about the parrot is that the parrot was deceased when Cleese bought it. The controversy continues: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykN-00i7VVs
• Sue W on Leveraged ETFs With 300% Exposures Set To Launch I don't think it'll be as long as 10 years. The old fashioned wisdom is that the market bottom hasn't been reached until all of these speculators have finally puked their guts out in the gutter...the problem is that this might take the entire "world economy as we know it" into a black hole (that is a massive discontinuity). Looking at economic history, this is the kind of long term periodic event that seems likely to happen to average out the long-term effect of making money out of thin air. Forbidding day-trading seems prudent. However the fact that people want to buy things that others have held for <24 hours is the problem. Way back to the Dutch East India Company the value of a share in what was, long term, an insolvent company run for the benefit of its operators (cf. Braudel), kept going up and up until only an idiot could believe in it...and the idiots keep buying.