joes

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

The naive government bashing is useless, we elected these people, each of us voted for the last guy or this guy, and the reality is that government policies make small differences in the long run. History shows as long as they are trying "something", it helps to relieve some tension and markets to operate.

In the long run it is earnings that matter, and it is clear that business needs to provide those. But when you have a group of CEO's that come begging to DC, then the first order of the day is to can them and move on to the next set of blue suits.

White collar crime needs to be policed, maybe by retraining the guys chasing potheads, they have never caused the pain and suffering that the Paulsons' and Greenspans have wrought.

The Escalator of Life Is Going Down (Part 2)

Your perspective is so short that any analysis that you draw from it is useless. Ever since Reagan we have been going up? How about the growth since 1950, you are using charts to show a small period of time as being an unprecedented situation.

Well all situations are unprecedented when you have more than a few moving parts, and despite the deep wisdom of Bon Jovi I'm going to pass on this useless collection of misinformation.

AIG Bonuses Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg

I think people do care about fairness, even thought it is never really achieved it becomes the symbol of the greed and incompetence. Merrill has not escaped yet, the best anyone with a bonus can hope for is that the focus of our ever smaller and less effective financial press loses interest and moves on to GM or some other failing segment of the economy.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

The ratio of highest to lowest paid in an organization is a logical way to evaluate company culture and appears to be a leading indicator of manipulation.

I think they should be able to pay what the BOD approves, with each member's vote being known and the pay ratio compared with peer for investor evaluation.

The 'Stress Test' Challenge: Transparency and Intellectual Integrity

The "stress test" approach seems to be a simple way of creating a standard for evaluating the banks businesses, a major step up from the Bush-Paulson approach of doing weekend deals that resulted emergency actions, increasing panic.

If I was cynical I would say that the GOP purposely drove panic as they were getting thrown out of town, they never stop campaigning, which explains why they never had time to govern.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

As a BOA shareholder as a result of a diversification effort in the fall gone bad there is nothing I would love to see more than Ken Lewis ousted from his job. The guys in government can't do half of the damage of these celebrity CEO's.

We need a program similar to the drug laws, 20 years for any fraud case, life for anything over $10 million and the death penalty for $1 Billion and up. Corruption is a larger danger to our society than terrorism and it needs to be treated appropriately.

Merrill Lynch Datapoint of the Day

The financial industry has become a dysfunctional component of the economy and not by accident.

Paulson, Lewis, Greenspan and many others have been exposed as the charlatans of our times, the same as the alchemists that were reaping huge payments to turn lead into gold. The only difference is that this group has turned trust into pain.

Cramer's Stop Trading! Will the Banks Be Nationalized? (1/15/09)

The argument between socialism and capitalism is invalid as there is clearly a hybrid combination of the two philosophies in the US and most other countries. Reagan was the leader of the obviously flawed theory that free markets self correct, Freidmann and Greenspan were put in charge of creating the largest ponzi scheme allowing bank managers to get paid as laws created more automatic payments through 401K's and pension funds.

No body forced people to give loans, no one removed the fiscal responsibilities of the lenders, the lack of regulation unleased the dogs and now they have picked our bones.