First, I have a little ‘public service announcement’ to make concerning my ‘absence’ over the next couple of days.
My cardiologist’s office called this afternoon and advised me my surgery has been moved to next Thursday. They had an, er, ‘emergency’ (that can wait until 4:00 PM tomorrow, so I guess it’s just ‘kind of’ an emergency.) Well, either way, whoever it is needs to be treated before they do anything for me. So I lose another week in the process, and I ain’t getting paid for this.)
As you may have discerned for yourself, I will not be absent over the next couple of days, contrary to an earlier post I made.
In fact, I no longer feel confident in providing future warnings about potential absences given the unreliability of certain sectors of the healthcare system. Which is more than a little unfair as this is the first time I’ve encountered this situation…which may be more commonplace than I realize now that I’m entering the realm of ‘high demand’ health care.
And naturally, this has nothing to do with tonight’s offering , which we shall skip on to without further delay…
Blankfein on Bonuses and Regulation
September 9, 2009, 8:08 am
Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, said Wednesday that multiyear, guaranteed pay contracts for bankers should be banned but also warned that over-regulation could end up stifling the financial markets. [These guys are too much, aren’t they. Ever since Bush did away with the usury laws, these clowns think what they do is, er, ‘socially useful’.]
Mr. Blankfein’s remarks, made in a statement prepared for delivery at a banking conference in Frankfurt, addressed at least two major issues hanging over the global finance industry one year after a crisis plunged Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy protection and sent world markets reeling. [How about that, it’s been a year already, let’s see, what new regulations did they put in place to head off a repeat of this disaster? Oh, right, there aren’t any!]
One of these issues is Wall Street bonuses, and how they might have contributed to risk-taking that planted the seeds of the financial crisis. The question of whether to limit bankers’ bonuses has been hotly debated in Europe in recent weeks. [What’s truly amazing is that there’s any ‘debate’ at all. None of these overpaid turdherders has made any money since 2007 so they don’t deserve bonuses.]
Mr. Blankfein, who was the highest-paid chief executive on Wall Street a few years ago but didn’t get any bonus in 2008, said Wednesday that some kinds of pay structures were hard to justify and suggested new curbs were necessary.
“Compensation continues to generate controversy and anger,” he said in the statement. “And, in many respects, much of it is understandable and appropriate. There is little justification for the payment of outsized discretionary compensation when a financial institution lost money for the year.”
He also said: “Multiyear guaranteed employment contracts should be banned entirely. The use of these contracts unfortunately is a common practice in our industry.”
When it reported big profits in the second quarter, Goldman said this summer that it had already set aside more than $11 billion for compensation for its workers. That figure generated some public controversy, coming during a recession and so soon after Goldman repaid aid from the United States government. [And so soon after it was revealed Goldman is using supercomputers to ‘front run’ the markets, but somehow it’s legal when they do it…]
Also on Wednesday, Mr. Blankfein expressed support for certain reforms of the financial industry, such as moving derivatives trading to exchanges and central clearing houses.
But he urged against creating a thicket of new regulations covering financial firms and products that could choke off innovation and profitability.
He said that “taking risk completely out of the system will be at the cost of economic growth.”
Okay good citizen, let’s see if we have this straight…if we revoke Wall Street’s ‘license to steal’ the economy won’t ‘grow’…apparently because Mr. Blankfein said so.
Geez Louis, what we if went back to the old fashioned way of investing, where people invested directly in local concerns and actually knew where their money was and what it was doing?
Wouldn’t you agree that our major malfunction these days is there’s too little domestic investment in local infrastructure? The money is all going to China to take advantage of ‘cheap labor’, which doesn’t do the domestic economy a bit of good.
I’d like to once again remind you that the ‘banking industry’ exists to serve the community, not to legally extort what it can from society.
I find it deeply disturbing when community spirited bankers like Mr. Blankfien fail to even raise the issue of our missing usury laws.
I mean, missing an issue as important as that sort of makes him look like a…well, you know.
It makes him look like a thief!
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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