BRADY DECIDES TO GIVE HIMSELF A BONUS
Cracking me up at the moment is the the sight of the American public and its elected officials - who in accordance with the new trickle-up theory have been giving away their descendants' economy - getting rabid over the fact that on the way out of the public bank with their arms full of billions of taxpayer dollars, one of the thieves bent down and picked up a penny off the floor as a bonus. What an outrage! ($165 million / $1.1 trillion = .015%)So after a long spell of reading all the mind-numbing economic news from the USA, and following deep and responsible consideration - one doesn't approach such issues lightly - I've decided to give myself a bonus, like the guys at the Big Trough in Washington.
I haven't decided yet how big my bonus will be; it's tricky in my case because, unlike the Wall Streeters, I deserve a bonus more than they do, since I'm not rewarding myself for losing other people's money and haven't committed possible malfeasance, plus I care about appearing too greedy. Integrity can hold you back in this kind of situation.
On the other hand, I don't want my bonus to be too small, because once the job withers and after the foreclosure my pension dries up just as medical care blows away in the economic duststorm that's coming - thanks to the unceasing hand-over-fist work of all those folks at the top of the pyramid - I'm gonna need some long-term partytime backup, so I figure a modest 10 million rapidly shrinking dollars should cover the tab till the next bubble.
First, though, I have to incorporate myself as a failing but needy financial entity that has avoided paying taxes for decades. How does CitiBrady, Morgan, Lynch, Gold, Merrill and Sachsman sound? Mind you, this is not a bailout, it's just humble greed. But at least I'm being honest.
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"People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — 'our partners in the government,' as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers."
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — 'our partners in the government,' as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers."
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"When a bank says an asset is worth 60 cents and the market says it's worth 30 cents, someone has to cover that spread. The genius of Geithner's plan is that it pawns most of the cost (and most of the risk) off on the taxpayer without the taxpayer noticing.
But unless the taxpayer gets stuck with the entire spread, which is probably what Geithner is hoping, banks that sell assets will have to take massive writedowns. This will start the whole cycle of violence again."
3 comments:
I'd rather they be honest than lie. I say go for it Bob. I applaud such American ingenuity!
I'm thinking of writing myself a big fat grant so I can move to Mexico and lie on the beach and ignore these bozos.
Hmmmmmm . . . I wonder if I could that work . . .
Can you imagine them sitting around in the boardroom and giving the bonuses the Ok while chicken Licken and the sky fall down all around them?
A buck in the hand is worth two in the Bush, or is that a buck in time saves nine? Don't know, but then I think my fiscal reasoning is just as coherent as theirs.
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