The Republicans put out a their "Road to Recovery"
The Fed's Public Private Partnership Program, promises to clear down as much as $1T worth of "legacy assets" from banks balance sheets. Globally, equity markets responded positively. But what about assets held off balance sheet?He continues...
All of this is to say, it looks like the hole is deeper than we are told.Off balance sheet vehicles originally were designed to mitigate risk, focusing investments into subsidiaries so credit ratings or leverage ratios of parent companies wouldn't be impacted. Many financial firms improperly used such vehicles to hide poorly performing assets, culminating in the well known collapse of Enron in 2002. Last July The Financial Accounting Standards group postponed FAS statement 140 - which would require firms to move assets on to their balance sheets - for one year, an impending deadline that concerns many analysts.
How much is held off balance sheet? As of Q1 2009 off balance sheet assets at the four largest US banks - Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America - totaled roughly $5T, or a sum potentially dwarfing Geithner's trillion dollar plan.
Regulators are aware of the problem and already are planning to increase requirements for economic capital, but considering how reluctant the United States was to adopt Basel II [.pdf] , a real fix could take a while.
The Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP), Treasury Secretary Geithner's plan to save the US financial sector from catastrophe, is...uh...complicated. I won't try to describe it (for that, I"d suggest going here). I will say that from what I understand, it is basically asking the private "investors" to price something that will mostly (completely?) be paid for with tax dollars.Depositors didn't all stick around to see how things worked out. A year ago, the bank was sitting on those $19 billion in deposits. When it was finally sold last Thursday, that number had fallen to $6.4 billion.
would apply only to payments made from January 1, 2009 forward. But almost prospective is like half pregnant. The bill is retrospective for just long enough to clawback the politically fetishized AIG bonuses, while leaving those who made out during the thick of the toxic credit bubble completely untouched. It has all of the philosophical distastefulness of an ex post law, and no offsetting benefit whatsoever, other than punishing a few trophy miscreants from AIG. [em]
[I]t might be nice to think about those of us who've recently left and are struggling with some pretty crippling student loan debt...
And I'll go them one better--I don't require, or even request, a full-on bailout. I don't need something for nothing. Just make me a deal whereby I spend a handful of years in the public sector making what people in the field make--teaching in a public school, for instance, since
that's where my expertise lies--and in return, I get rid of my student loans.
[R]ight now we do student loans through a really pointless mechanism of basically laundering the money through private firms. All of the downside risk is borne by the government in case of default. And the lenders receive federal subsidies for doing the service of undertaking no-risk lending. But of course the companies also take a slice off the top for profits and salaries for executives and so forth. Consequently, this is more expensive than just directly lending the money. And the government is bearing all the risk anyway.
The most infuriating part of Monday's discussion for me was when Bob Dupay, the president of Major League Baseball, stood up and said if Miami wanted to be considered a major American city then it needed to build the stadium.
Major League Baseball should be ashamed of themselves. They have created and fostered a system whereby communities are extorted for money. If Major League Baseball cared about the communities they serve they should have set up a fund a long time ago to help teams build their own stadiums. And the only reason Major League Baseball doesn't take responsibility for their own construction projects are because elected officials keep doing it for them.
It's way too early to pass judgment on the legacy of the Obama administration, but the one thing you can say is that all of the predictions made by folks on both sides of the political spectrum have been off the mark: he's not the wild-eyed socialist Black Panther liberal the right feared he was (and in a perverse way hoped he would be so they could raise campaign funds on secret photos of Angela Davis playing on the White House swing set), and he's not the crusading progressive mowing down the malefactors of great wealth and purveyors of narrow-minded homophobia and intolerance that the liberals hoped he would be, either. The most predictable -- and maddening -- thing Barack Obama has done is defy predictions.
Meanwhile, I actually think the most distressing thing about the criticism from folks like Krugman and Stiglitz is what you can infer reading between the lines from how ferocious it is. They, and other leading critics, are acting like people who’ve been totally shut out of the consultation/communication loop. And it’s distressing to see people of their stature and expertise getting shut out while the administration works harder on kissing Wall Street’s ass to try to persuade the finance class to avoid deliberately sabotaging the economy.
So here was one of Obama's top economic advisers undermining Geithner's key claim (we have no choice!) and questioning Romer's characterization of the firms participating in the toxic assets program. This was not a confidence booster. And I wondered what it would be like to sit in the room when Obama's economic advisers get together and try to sort all this out.
So, I think that public notification in newspapers is a good idea whereas the website approach is not as good. On the other hand, the view that says that your municipal planning staff is a Menace 2 Society is...uh...not exactly the most positive take.This legislation (SB 2292; HB 1477) by Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Brandon, and Rep. Juan Zapata, R-Miami, is the antithesis of open government and should be allowed to expire without further ado.
These proposals are, in fact, a great example of how government can labor in obscurity — and sometimes menacingly — if citizens, and the media, don't have ready access to information about city, county, school, state and federal agencies.
Legal notices are but one way, yet an important way, to be forewarned and thereby forearmed regarding proposed changes to your neighborhood, your street, your school zone or your wallet.
The market is made up of all types of participants: rational, irrational, some focused on the past, some on the future, some obsessed with Washington, others with China. In October 2007, with the Dow at 14,000, did the market "know" a recession was about to start and that a financial tsunami was about to hit? Um, no. Of course, over time the market does respond to fundamentals like earnings and dividend payments. But in the past half-dozen months, the fundamentals have been fundamentally unsound. The S&P 500 could be at around 700 because Obama is a Commie who wants to destroy free enterprise. Or it could be at around 700 because that's roughly 15 times the index's estimated operating earnings per share.
One hundred plane trips and nary a single disclosure as to what they're all about? I realize you don't have to, Charlie, but c'mon -- let us know about the special interests, or don't take the trips. I know you can do it. You're so cool.The last line sounds a bit bitter to me. Could it be that there is weak support out side of Florida for a Crist Senate run?
class war:A commentor responds:In one corner are the technocrats not only in finance but also in government and the media: people who can understand the importance of distinguishing between a $250,000 base salary, a $2.5 million bonus, a $250 million bonus pool, a $2.5 billion bonus pool, a $250 billion bailout package, a $2.5 trillion monetary stimulus, and so on.
In the other corner are the real people, the angry people, the unemployed people -- and with them their elected representatives in Congress. They're not interested in such distinctions any more, they're not interested in what's fair or what's sensible. They saw their real wages stagnate for decades as the orgy of plutocratic self-congratulation reached obscene levels only to keep on growing. All they ever had was the American Dream: the idea that they, too, might one day become dynastically wealthy and join the overclass.
Now, of course, that dream is shattered -- and, what's worse, it turns out that very overclass is responsible for the working classes' own present straits. While the talking heads in New York and Washington throw around their millions and billions and trillions before commuting home to their comfortable middle-class-and-better lifestyles, the rest of the country is mad as hell, and ain't gonna take it any more. They're not interested in constructive solutions or in leveraging private capital or in the sanctity of contracts: fuck that shit. Those days are over. They want to see jail time, confiscatory policies, and worse.
And just imagine what an American revolution might look like... proper pensions, a labour movement, maybe even an NHS...Good god, it'd bring them kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.Meanwhile, not having 60 Democratic Senators means that programs like the ones above may have to go through all sorts of contortions to have a chance at being passed.
Mellencamp), that is interesting but, I think, fundamentally off-base. I'd suggest that you read the whole thing, but the one portion that stands out for me is the following:These days, some people suggest that it is up to the artist to create avenues to sell the music of his own creation. In today's environment, is it realistic to expect someone to be a songwriter, recording artist, record company and the P.T. Barnum, so to speak, of his own career? Of course not. I've always found it amusing that a few people who have never made a record or written a song seem to know so much more about what an artist should be doing than the artist himself. If these pundits know so much, I'd suggest that make [sic] their own records and just leave us out of it.
the re-districting issue. It's an important issue to be sure. I say, however, why bother reading about it when you can play an online video game in which you become the tawdry re-districting official yourself!
The saving grace in all this of course, is that Floridians aren't saddled with that "insidious" intangibles tax on wealthy investors, that raised hundreds of millions in tax dollars.
Other metrics are also available at the page linked above.
The housing trouble began -- as most of AIG's troubles did -- when the company's board buckled under pressure from then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer when it fired longtime CEO Hank Greenberg. Almost immediately, Fitch took away the company's triple-A credit rating, which allowed it to borrow at cheaper rates. AIG subsequently announced an earnings restatement. The restatement addressed alleged accounting sins that Mr. Spitzer trumpeted initially but later dropped from his civil complaint.Having layed the blame at the feet of a figure hated on Wall Street, the WSJ continues:
Other elements of the restatement were later reversed by AIG itself. But the damage had been done. The restatement triggered more credit ratings downgrades. Mr. Greenberg's successors seemed to understand that the game had changed, warning in a 2005 SEC filing that a lower credit rating meant the firm would likely have to post more collateral to trading counterparties. But rather than managing risks even more carefully, they went in the opposite direction. Tragically, they did what Mr. Greenberg's AIG never did -- bet big on housing.Shorter WSJ: malicious investigations forced AIG to bet on housing. What does this evil doer have to say for himself?
When my office, along with the Department of Justice, warned that some of American International Group's reinsurance transactions were little more than efforts to create the false impression of extra capital on the company's balance sheet, we were jeered at for attacking one of the nation's great insurance companies, which surely knew how to balance risk and reward.Ouch, what does he say about the current state of affairs?
So, the WSJ piece knocks on Spitzer for being too aggressive in the context of a piece questioning the lack of oversight by the government (huh?). Meanwhile, Spitzer points out something that is verifiable and public - AIG is shoveling government money over to wealthy people. Yeah, I'm going to go with the zealous prosecutor.The appearance that [the AIG bailout] was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.
One may reasonably conclude that Geithner, as head of the New York Fed, had a good understanding of the sort of compensation packages that were used at financial institutions like AIG. It is also reasonable to assume that if he didn't explicitly take steps to change these practices following the Fed's takeover of AIG, that the practices would still be in place.
In other words, insofar as he gave the matter any thought at all, it is reasonable to assume that Geithner knew that AIG would be paying large bonuses to most-valued employees. If he did not give it any thought then it was because he did not care that a firm receiving more $160 billion worth of taxpayer dollars was paying multi-million dollar bonuses to its top executives. It is implausible on its face that Geithner was surprised by this situation. [emphasis mine]
It's an utter waste of government time and money to go on the offense and
direct senior government people to do something about the bonuses, no matter how distasteful. Not to mention, Congress is busy today putting AIG's senior management through the wringer, when many of those now in power at AIG were in fact not on duty when the ship went down. Edward Liddy, AIG's current CEO, for example, was appointed in September last year to help get the life boats out.
There is no shortage of blame to go around. But there is a shortage of time and political will, which should not be squandered on hopeless cases like this one.
Some say that it was Geithner and Summers pushed to remove the language regarding the limits on compensation. I say that we need to remember the context of the ARRA Senate voting context. The Obama administration was actively trying to curry Republican support. The list of concessions to Republicans was very outsized and painful (here is such a list, see the "What's Out" heading). But those are programs and there were other changes that the Republicans wanted. Most salient here is Mitch McConnell talking about his opposition to limiting compensation:
It is a tough challenge. I think we are all appalled by these -- some ofthese executive salary arrangements and bonus arrangements and perks and all the rest. On the other hand, I really don't want the government to take over these businesses and start telling them everything about what they can do. Then you truly have nationalized the business. So it is a delicate dance to try to prevent blatant abuses and still not have the government as a result of taking an equity position in the government telling them, for example, you can't pay dividends or you can't -- I mean, things that are just ordinary business practices. We have to resist the temptation to basically dictate to these businesses how to run every aspect of their operation.
So let me be clear about what I believe. Wall Streeters (including Geithner and Summers) are desensitized to the meaning of these massive sums for the majority of Americans. This is a group of people who believe that $500,000/year is not enough. They craft a stimulus bill that is fraught with political compromises (compromises that they do not know will be pointless as they will not receive support for them from the opposition party). Included in the raft of concessions is a limit on executive compensation...essentially allowing for a handout to wealthy AIG employees.
I imagine that the thinking is that this concession will lead to a bigger simulus dollar figure in the end (because it wasn't actually in the stimulus package...the money came from the TARP allocations, direct bailout dollars, etc...not ARRA). Could they have substituted $165 million in, say, transportation money in exchange for the bonuses? I doubt it. I don't know if anyone had calculated how much the bonuses would be at all. I do know it was giving in to the Republicans during a contentious moment when the Obama peope thought they could get bi-partisan support. I also know that the government wanted money to be spent.
Do I think that the AIG bonuses were proper? I think they're outrageous. Do I think that Bremmer is correct? I agree that compared to the size of the whole crisis, this is small. I also agree that spending a week on this is not the best use of anyone time in light of the crisis. But I think that the public might need to be outraged in order to push forward other parts of the agenda that they may otherwise be ambivalent about (for example EFCA, whose support is growing but still needs more help).
Bloomberg may be correct, though...a currying of outrage, if this is what the administration is doing, may backfire.
In Wednesday’s NY Times, this article: New Jersey Sues Over Its Lehman Losses - DealBook Blog - NYTimes.com served as a reminder of how Florida got ripped off in the same way. Has Florida sued? Not mentioned in the article, though California was cited as having sued beforeThe Bond Buyer reports that the wheels are actually starting to turn in the investigation by the SEC of the State Board of Administration (I can't copy and paste the text, so here is a snap):
New Jersey.
Where are we? Why no suit?
New Jersey is out $180 million thanks to the collapse of Lehman. Florida also lost many millions, though a light search doesn’t reveal how much. There is an interesting similarity between Florida and New Jersey, in that both states had a board of officials supposedly overseeing the operation of the fund — like the money market funds we ordinary citizens have been forced to use by our friendly banks — where revenue was parked until needed by local governments to pay their staff and other obligations. In Florida it’s the State Board of Administration.
The SEC letter is here. As FCP notes, there seemed to have been connections between Jeb Bush and Lehman Bros.
The article has a line describing each of the eight projects. None of these are transit-oriented.The Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization, a board of city and county leaders who set transportation priorities, voted today to send the final, eight-item list to Tallahassee, estimating the projects would create at least 720 jobs.
The vote clears the way for Florida to begin receiving federal stimulus cash, as Palm Beach County's was the last transportation board in the state to have not already submitted its project list. State transportation officials will review this and other stimulus wish lists from across the state to ensure all projects are eligible before forwarding them to the legislature for final approval. [Emphasis mine]
What about construction-related work? Enter, the American Institute of Architecture:So what's going on with starts? A big part of the jump came from condos, apartments and townhomes. And a fair amount of that activity flowed from warmer-than-expected weather. If that leads you to think maybe we should give the data another month or two before we start drawing trend lines, I'd be likely to agree with you. As one analyst cautioned, we might be looking at a "weather-related fluke."
It could also be a data-related fluke. Journalists almost never report on statistics precisely, which I'm sure drives all manners of social scientists batty. Here's the actual wording from the press release: "Privately-owned housing starts in February were at a seasonally adjusted annual
rate of 583,000. This is 22.2 percent (±13.8%) above the revised January estimate of 477,000, but is 47.3 percent (±5.3%) below the revised February 2008 rate of 1,107,000."In other words, housing starts could be up 36%, or they could be up 8.4%. It's a range. And, technically, we're only 90% sure the real figure is in that range.
“Despite a higher [Architecture Billings Index] score than last month, we are likely to see light demand for new construction projects through much of the year,” said AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA. “There is hope that the stimulus bill will result in more project activity, but that is also dependent on banks easing lending standards in the months ahead." [emphasis mine].
A line from a New York Times profile of [Rod Blagojevich] is as trenchant a description of narcissism as is found in most psychology textbooks: "[He] is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush." There it all is: the sense that other people don't matter, the belief others are instruments for the narcissist's use, the self-admiration.All kidding aside, this kind of pop-psychology must be pretty popular because Emily Yoffe (previously) has done it before. But popular isn't always good. And Yoffe is firing off labels without respecting how difficult it is to define and determine a disorder/disability as a part of someone's thoughts/behaviors/feelings. Of course, this culminates in a smallish statement about our culture in general, "If the observers who say that part of our economic troubles result from a mass case of narcissism, from consumers who thought they should have the house of their dreams financed on bad debt to bankers who thought they deserved eight-figure bonuses for packaging that bad debt, then perhaps we are about to be cured". Interestingly, there's no mention of wage stagnation regarding consumer debt. Very naughty, Slate. thoughts/behaviors/feelings.
Not funny and not true. Bad Fark. Jane Hamsher has the goods:But the bill that passed the Senate actually made the compensation limits retroactive, according to the Wall Street Journal...Between this and the public declaration of Geithner's job being safe, one is left wondering who exactly is directing the cover-your-ass campaign? Has the party given up Dodd for dead?
Who pushed back against Dodd, and told him to neuter the provision? The WSJ says Geithner and Summers...
Dodd's version prohibited TARP recipients from paying out bonuses, retention awards or incentive compensation to the 25 most highly compensated employees. It also prohibited any employee of a company receiving TARP funds from making more than the President. Both provisions would have been in effect so long as a company was receiving TARP funds. Since AIG just paid out $1 million in bonuses to 73 employees, Dodd's version limiting all employees to
what the President made (roughly $500,000) would have substantially nipped that in the bud...
So -- in the end, all compensation limits only applied to contracts written after February 11, at the specific request of Timothy Geithner, and AIG was able to pay out $286 million in bonuses on Sunday...
Clicking on the link you'll find a photo essay of the jobs, but here they are in a bulleted list:
It may be true that these jobs are recession-proof (I can't say). It is also true that most require a significant time commitment towards education, not to mention some degree of passion for the field. What's more, some of these have a few more candidates than postions available, which leads to the question, is this some kind of SS joke?
the AIG bonuses has been described as "populist". Over at Marc Ambinder's Atlantic page, you might have seen the picture on the right.As its name implies, populism sees itself primarily devoted to furthering and defending the interests and attitudes of ordinary citizens. It has traditionally been distrustful of large and powerful organizations, whether public or private. It views massive government bureaucracy and corporate privilege with equal suspicion. Moreover, concentrations of power and privilege held too long by the same persons lead inevitably to moral and political corruption. This view has two consequences: The first is a preference for regular rotations of positions of authority and power. The second is a preference for popular participation in economic and political structures that affect the lives of ordinary citizens.You could say that any grouping of the "ordinary" citizens implies that there is some implicit group of "extraordinary" citizens and that that idea is insulting. On the other hand, denying that there are people with more power in any given group is not accurate. In this way, I have to recognize that I am ok with the term "ordinary" as a way of saying "not as empowered as others are".
Now, Ambinder has some analysis noting the implications of this outrage if it really is populist. But ultimately I think that the angry responses have more to do with a more basic sense of justice. Fraud is wrong, and it is deeply unsettling.
Hanna Rosin wrote an article for the Atlantic that is sure to rile up some folks. In it, she lays out the "Case Against Breast-Feeding". Except, she doesn't actually make acase against breast-feeding. Instead, it's a case against the popular literature that preferences breast-feeding. This is fair because, if we believe her, the scientific evidence about the value of breast-feeding shows that...well, it shows that there isn't too much value in it.Breast-feeding does not belong in the realm of facts and hard numbers; it is much too intimate and elemental.
The federal transportation stimulus money that's supposed to create jobs the fastest is being held up in Florida by Palm Beach County.Ouch. Why the hold up?
With all correspondence being publicly available, you'd think that we could actually see if the MPO is covering for someone or if they shot off an email without a date.Palm Beach County Commissioner Jeff Koons...blamed the county's tardiness on confusion over when cities had to submit their lists of projects for stimulus consideration. For example, Riviera Beach, Royal Palm Beach and Wellington never responded to the MPO's call for cities to submit wish lists.
Koons said the MPO never gave the cities a clear deadline by which to respond.
Considering that Cramer's show, in particular, went back to normal the day after the interview, this call may fall on deaf ears. I say "may" because, at the end of the day, I don't think Cramer was ever the problem (and the letter tacitly acknowledges this). In his show, Jim Cramer is not a journalist, he is a former hedge fund manager...an insider. CNBC, on ther other hand, touts itself as a news outlet. In other words, real change needs to occur in order for the network to fulfill this role in good faith, not on the set of Mad Money, but on that of the Squawk Box and The Call.Building off of the momentum from last week, in which CNBC personality Jim Cramer was subjected to an embarrassing lecture by the Daily Show's Jon Stewart, the group is launching, alongside its letter, a website: http://fixcnbc.com/.
"Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism -- asking tough questions to Wall Street, debunking lies, and reporting the truth," the letter reads. "Instead, CNBC has done PR for Wall Street. You've been so obsessed with getting 'access' to failed CEOs that you willfully passed on misinformation to the public for years, helping to get us into the economic crisis we face today. You screwed up badly. Don't apologize -- fix it!"
is just laziness. It isn't as though GM defended the pay of its employees in the same way that AIG has defended the pay of theirs. "We know we promised you this money, but it's clearly politically impossible for us to pay it to you. So you're not getting the bonus you were counting on. Sorry about that. At this point, you have three choices. You can continue to work for us, and keep your job. You can quit, and find a better-paying job elsewhere. Or you can quit, and sue us for the bonus that we promised you. Your call. But if you choose the third option, you'll probably want to hire a PR person at the
same time as you hire a lawyer"
Maybe you could roll the dice on a new job. Or maybe you'd just shut up and get back to work.
So who are the biggest givers?Florida law bans legislators from accepting more than $500 from each donor who contributes to their individual campaign accounts.
But there is no limit on the amount of cash that lawmakers can collect from all manner of special interests in separate fundraising committees that the lawmakers create to advance broadly defined public purposes, such as getting one another reelected.
The Hospital Corporation of America, a major hospital chain seeking to change the way more than $1 billion in hospital money is awarded each year, donated the most money to the committees: $269,500 in the past two years. HCA also donated an additional $865,000 to other committees and to individual lawmaker campaigns in the same two-year period.
U.S. Sugar Corp. of Clewiston, which has hired 41 lobbyists in seeking to sell much of its land to the state, is next with $226,260. It donated an additional $365,000 to lawmakers and other political groups this election cycle.
AT&T, which is seeking favorable phone legislation this year, was the No. 3 contributor with $151,500.
Of course, the point Fineout makes is that there is more information that the agencies haven't accounted for:Back in 2005, former Gov. Jeb Bush trumpeted the fact that Standard and Poor's increased the state's bond rating to AAA, citing the "state's strong reserves and long term planning to avoid budget crises" as reasons for the decision. The reason it was big news is that with a better bond rating comes a much better borrowing rate.
All of the rating agencies have placed Florida on a negative outlook, said Ben Watkins, director of the State Division of Bond Finance, although none have yet downgraded the state's actual rating. [emphasis mine]
Right now it appears that the state will drain another $700 million from the [Lawton Chiles Endowment] by June 15 in order to balance this year's budget.It looks like the hole may very well get deeper soon. Meanwhile, the legislature is debating whether or not Super Bowl tickets and skybox seats should be taxed.
you know something. Some people are good at the latter. Andrew B. Hellinger shows us he is not one of them:Initiatives to lure suburbia's residents into Miami's urban core need to be considered to maximize what development has already occurred and to prevent Miami from becoming an urban wasteland. Given the scarcity of local, state and federal funds, this will be a challenge for our civic leaders.
I saw this quiz on Ezra Klein's blog and I agree that without any reliability or validity data, it isn't exactly a sound assessment instrument (that scale is problematic, why didn't they go with a Likert?) . Still, it's interesting to play around with. See it here and have a great weekend!Foreclosures spiked by 30 percent last month. All told, 290,631 homeowners got either the news or the boot, depending on how far along in the process they were. The Mortgage Bankers Association calculates that 11.18 percent of all loans was either in foreclosure or at least one payment behind.
The fear now is that the new foreclosures are driven by rising unemployment, and not fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis. New weekly claims rose by 9,000, to 654,000.
The other day at church coffee hour, of all places, I met a guy who does risk management for a major bank. He says they're solid through 10 or 11 percent unemployment. That's in the neighborhood of the Federal Reserve's "adverse scenario" for stress testing banks, at 10.3 percent unemployment next year.
So many questions...
My problem here is the statement, "Sports can and does bring money". This conveniently misses the point, which is do sports investments bring in more money than they cost? There is much controversy on this. Here comes the research (pdf):
It is difficult to argue using this type of reasoning, however, when a more politcally powerful argument is being made to the decision-makers.
far as I am concerned, when someone name-checks Jürgen Habermas in a piece about "The Daily Show" it just alienates most people. Having said that, Patterson is pretty direct in describing John Stewart's argument from last night:The notion was that the networks, being aware of a gap between image and reality that they had steadfastly refused to address in their coverage, had abdicated their journalistic responsibilities..."
argument noted above? The post author notes that higher violence rates may lead to a higher need for private gaurds and private gaurds are an inefficency. They then post the graph on the right (I circled Miami).Why bother with experts when you have executives in charge? Anyhow, the article goes on to say that employees are not allowed to publicly talk about the company. They do have an internal policy to deal with employee concerns and the Herald helpfully quotes an employee about it, "'Most are afraid of coming forward,' said Mike Kohl, a nuclear operator at Turkey Point."At 1:09 one afternoon last year, 90 metal rods slid into the cores of the two nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, part of an automatic shutdown that had been triggered by a utility worker's blunder moments earlier at a substation miles away. A million customers lost power.
Florida Power & Light executives ordered that the reactors be back online within 12 hours, according to court documents. The plant's top nuclear operator, David Hoffman, said that would be dangerous. When FPL executives disagreed with him, he walked out at 8 p.m., refusing to participate in actions he felt were unsafe.
The drumbeat of "worse than economists expected" negatively affects the nation's psyche and further depresses the economy. If economists had been better at predicting just how bad things were going to be, things wouldn't have gotten as bad as they have.
What the economy needs, obviously, is economists who will start expecting that the economy will be much worse than economists expect. Only then can we expect the economy to get better.
hourly compensation claims (ie the average hourly compensation for a worker is $60 an hour). Dean Baker notes:It would be helpful if the NYT and other media outlets would revert to normal English usage in discussing the compensation of auto workers. Ford is welcome to keep their books anyway they like, but payments that do not go in any form to current workers, like the cost of retiree health benefits, do not fit the definition of compensation. UAW auto workers are reasonably well-paid, but their compensation package is not as generous as this measure of "compensation" implies.I actually like the creativity of this "pay Person X, but label Person Y as recipient" approach. I am waiting for executive compensation to be rolled into the worker's numbers so that the media will report that some metal stamper is earning $300/hour.
