User 323857

Bank crisis, what bank crisis? Major U.S. banks and securities firms will pay workers about $140B this year, topping the $130B record set at the peak in 2007 and up from $117B in 2008. According to an in-depth study by the WSJ, workers at 23 top Wall Street firms will earn an estimated $143,400 on average.

Wonder if anyone has similar numbers for other sectors, like education (total and average payment for teachers grades 1 -12), or healthcare (total and average payments to doctors and nurses), or manufacturing. Would be interesting to compare sectors that actually do something to banking, where they electronically shift money around, keep the profits and put any losses onto the taxpayers.

Consumer credit: down $21.5B in July - a 10.5% annual rate, the biggest decline on record - to $2.47T. Economists expected it to decline by $4.5B. It's the sixth month in a row, and ninth of the past 10, that consumers have reduced their debt. Credit-card debt fell for a record 11th straight month, by $6.1B - an annualized 8.5%.

More likely the banks are cutting credit lines, and credit card companies like AMEX are cutting credit limits. (Which is outrageous after all the free money they took, and current access to money at 0.25% - if something needed to be pruned back, it was banker bonuses.)
If you thought you would buy something and put in on plastic so you could pay it off over time - you're outta luck.

But then again so is anybody who thought they were going to sell anything this year - s-o-l.

Apple and Amazon's Open Embrace

What if AAPL releases a Tablet - wouldn't the Kindle interface work even better there? Is Amazon looking ahead to that time?

February ETF Deathwatch Expands to 153 Names

My God! Hasn't anyone proposed a BAILOUT for these troubled ETFs? In our country, we don't let bad ETFs just go bankrupt! We keep them on life support, even using taxpayer money if we have too!! Call Hank Paulson - he can get some ETF bazooka money right away, I'm sure . . . .

Cramer on Obama's "there will be a time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses. Now’s not that time. And that’s a message that I intend to send directly to them" - "Let me tell you something, we heard Lenin."

Cramer! Jeez, get some horse-sense. No one is calling for the end of being able to make an honest profit. But Obama and many others are calling for the end of obscene, over-the-top, civilization ruining, hog-in-the-money-troug... wallowing, greedy money grabbing that the bank CEO's have participated in during the last 8 years. You KNOW NOTHING about what the little people think when they see the guys with the golden commodes thumbing their noses as they ride in their all-expenses-paid limos to their free private jets, always paid with Other People's Money. You KNOW NOTHING about people being laid off with no notice and no severance, even though they have been successful at their work, and how they feel when they see the O'Neal's and Thain's getting sacked for ABJECT FAILURE and walking away with $MILLIONS after they have already stuffed their gluttonous gut to the gagging point at the job they were supposed to be doing, but were out playing golf, or bridge, or flying (for free) to Davos, etc, etc.

You KNOW NOTHING about hearing voices from the past - it's not Lenin you hear in Obama's words, it's Marie Antoinette's words you hear in your own voice. Sure, charge outrageous fees for changing the names on a few companies, or peddling some new stock, bankrupt your company, send the world into depression, and then keep saying "I deserve my bonus - I really deserve my bonus - What no one else even has a job? Well, let them eat cake". You cannot defend those who have become nothing more than Biblical moneychangers without their filth rubbing off all over you and your formerly Golden Slacks.

The French have a word for the bonus they deserve: guillotine.