<p>"And the board gets paid huge sums for doing almost nothing. "</p>
<p>A member of the Board doesnt get “huge sums”. Sometimes there are stock grants involved but usually the salary component is low six figures. </p>
<p>“Companies used to pay dividends, now they hoard cash and pay CEO’s obscene multiples of what they are actually worth.”</p>
<p>Silliness. Publicly traded companies either have to provide a return to stock holders through growth or dividends. If they do neither, then shareholders will sell and stock price will crash. If anything US companies get criticized for focusing too much on short term share price performance- which is the opposite of what you suggest.</p>
<p>Some of you need to watch some Tom Woods on youtube. </p>
<p>You can watch videos of Austrian Economics CEO Peter Schiff in 2006 saying that we were going to have a huge crash, and economist from every other school laughing in his face at the time.</p>
<p>Actually YOU don’t have a clue if you think the real bailout didn’t happen at the fed window for the past years, where the TBTFs have been borrowing at zero and raking it in on that money. The real bailout wasn’t even Tarp. The real bailout was AIG, and the YEARS of free money. </p>
<p>It’s more than that, too. In terms of the mortgage buybacks. </p>
<p>How was the real bailout AIG? Greenberg is suing the Feds for forcing them to take a high interest loan they didnt really need when all that was required was short term liquidity of a relatively small amount. </p>
<p>The AIG bailout wasn’t for AIG, and he is right to sue. The AIG bailout was put together in order to make the counterparties whole. They used it to funnel millions of dollars to the usual suspects, and particularly Goldman, who had complete exposure.</p>
<p>Look, TARP was only 700 million. I say “only” as this is relative to the 9 Trillion in emergency loans the FED made to their favorites, at rates like: “gee have some money on us”, including allowing Lehman to fail while lending a foreign bank Barclays almost more than anybody else in order to buy them at bargain basement bankruptcy prices, since Lehman had refused to help with the Bear Stearns fire sale to Dimon, and Paulson and etc… held a grudge.</p>
<p>However, this is very Soviet-style, where the current incumbents nominate candidates (usually the incumbents) and then the voters (shareholders) get to say “yes” or “no”. Even when an opposition shareholder proposes alternative director candidates, the incumbents can get the final word in the arguments sent out in the voting papers. Additional anti-takeover defenses can make it even more difficult for opposition shareholders to succeed.</p>
<p>Yes, UCB, the whole thing is set up to protect the people already in power, as the whole FED set up is there to protect those already in power, as long as they are “in favor” with the powers that be.</p>
<p>Ben Bernake, an un-elected official, is arguably the most powerful man in the banking world, and he can just print all the money he wants for his buddies.</p>
<p>the worst is how they forced BofA to buy Merril and to buy Countrywide, and then turned around and left them hanging out to dry with their shareholders. But, they couldn’t refuse. So, not only did BofA NOT protect its shareholders, your federal reserve and Treasury told them they had to do this deal. Particularly Merill, which they really didn’t want to do, but Thane was Paulson’s man from Goldman. BofA wanted to do the Lehman deal.</p>
<p>I like a system wherein companies with unsuccessfully policies have negative consequences. I also recognize that there was a short term liquidity crisis which needed bridging and without it a great deal of further turmoil would have unnecessarily resulted. </p>
<p>The Federal government made money on TARP, which indicates the issue was liquidity not value.</p>
<p>[Also the government is structured around picking winners and losers- a kilowatt for electricity from Solyndra is good. A kilowatt from coal is bad. If the government gave up preferential treatment then politicians would lose their ability to extract money from donors as well as much of the fun of their jobs]</p>
<p>Exactly Mini. The Iceland way was the way that said to the banks, “forget it,” and said to the people, “let’s make it work.”</p>
<p>And there were all these threats of how the banks there wouldn’t be able to “keep talent,” and yet, the guys and gals who left the banks have gotten into all sorts of great industry.</p>
<p>It is the best thing that ever happened, and yet it continues to be ignored as an example.</p>
<p>ETA: Argbargy- so many things had to happen over the course of so many years, so much free money, forget it. 9TRillion dollars? Fine. Okay.</p>
<p>Let’s say it was liquidity, why 9Trillion to the favored banks and let the other guys fail? Why didn’t they get access to that money? Were their positions more absurd than Dimon’s or GS? No. They just weren’t connected. That is Crony Capitalism, the government picking the winners. And if you are going to pick banks, you might as well pick Auto companies who employ people, as well. You can’t leave out those campaign donors, either, when you are handing out the cash.</p>
<p>What average? This looks like the mean, which will skew upwards because of extraordinarily highly paid CEOs who are not representative of the lot. Moreover, those are CEOs of the “nation’s largest companies,” not all CEOs.</p>
<p>It is the best thing that ever happened, and yet it continues to be ignored as an example."</p>
<p>They also jailed people, put out international arrest warrants on bankers who fled, majorly changed their Constitution, took over the banks, refused to pay the banks’ debts, and let the shareholders take it on the chin.</p>
<p>The thing is people here talk about the TARP. TARP was the verbal patter the illusionists were doing while the FED was doing the rest. Look over here 700 million dollars. Don’t look over here, AIG Bailout, Fed Window borrowing, letting the small banks fail, giving the big banks, even from other countries, 9T dollars in practically free loans. But, hey, people will say, “The TARP worked.” The TARP is barely a fraction of what they were given, pennies. You could have given a monkey what they were given and he would have made a profit.</p>
<p>These same guys lobbying against regulation with the people who had to give them Trillions. It’s preposterous.</p>
<p>I wonder what will happen to Iceland’s credit when they don’t pay their loans. There will be consequences. The fed thinks they can print money to bail out companies here and people think that we’re better off because of it. When they print money it devalues every dollar on the planet. Since the fed came to, we have lost 96% of the dollars value. Can you imagine multiplying every dollar you have by 19 and prices staying the same?</p>