<p>sewhappy: the health care plan I described is still in place</p>
<p>Sewhappy…Actually…I will bring that up…he was talking about doing that…(that is a good idea…for him…)</p>
<p>He just left to go to the bathroom…</p>
<p>He also said that Kadhafi…if instead of keeping $100 billion for himself… had he kept $2 billion and spent the $98 billion in the country for his fellow citizens …he would be a hero in his former country and still be alive today…</p>
<p>well,then dstark, perhaps your prosperous friend will fund concierge medical care for, say a thousand or so of his fellow men when he gets back from the bathroom.</p>
<p>alh, we are having a hard time containing our delight over our oldest one deciding on medicine. Don’t expect he will earn as much as he could in other fields though.</p>
<p>we could have single payer national health care for the regular folks
and still concierge medicine for those able and willing to pay for it
like in the rest of the world</p>
<hr>
<p>sewhappy: in my family the accepted wisdom is NOT to go into medicine if big bucks are the goal. Of course, in my family, everyone has been expecting “socialized medicine” to spring into existence for the last 40 years.</p>
<p>Sewhappy…</p>
<p>My friend was interested in doing this with a specific doctor. The cost was $3,000.The doctor comes to the house…and the doctor said no. He has enough clients.</p>
<p>Your oldest one can go into concierge medicine…</p>
<p>One of the inequities that bother people is that the CEOs (and by CEO, read the entire staff of senior management, since it cascades) are getting huge increases, while the worker bees are being laid off. </p>
<p>According to the graphs Starbright posted, corporate profits have risen about 100% over the past 20 years, while CEO salaries have risen almost 300%. The question, then, is not, as sewhappy says, that people want to take away the money of those doing really well: the question is, how do the C-suite justify salaries almost 200% better than their companies, at the same time they’re riffing the workers. In other words, the CEO’s are not just doing well, but they’re doing substantially better than the companies they lead, and grossly better than the people who do the work that creates the company profits.</p>
<p>Sewhappy says "It’s as if people are feeling insecure and want “those people” to take care of them. ". I can understand why you don’t sympathize with the OWSers if this is your view. But I don’t hear people saying they want the rich to take care of them. You don’t hear people questioning the incomes of Jobs, or Gates, or other really productive people. They - we - are questioning the essential injustice of how income is set, and how it is increasingly being aggregated among fewer and fewer people.</p>
<p>You know how a CEO’s salary is determined? It has nothing to do with the common canards. “Accountability”, “risk taking” - all that’s a bunch of baloney. How is a CEO taking risk if he gets $100 million a year if he succeeds, and $20 million a year if he fails dismally and gets canned? Some risk! And let’s face it - most middle and senior managers spend as much time managing up, as they do in strategizing for the success of the firm that pays them.</p>
<p>This is a summary of how CEO, and then the layer below him/her, salaries get set. The board calls in a consultant who lays out the salary scale of other firms of similar size and industry. Then they establish the statistical mean. Each board then decides that their CEO has to be paid at the mean, or just over. Here’s a math question: if every board, at contract renewal, sets the CEO salary at the mean or just over, what does that do to CEO salaries over any given 3 - 4 year period?</p>
<p>Then of course, all the lower levels cascade down. Until you get to the actual workers, who spend time doing what the company gets paid for. They get no raises, and/or riffed. After all, the c-suite and the dividends have to get paid. CEOs are not all that successful as a breed, witness how our companies benchmark against other countries’. Their remuneration is not based on success, or performance, or accountability. You see the same glib-talkers hired, fired/with golden parachutes, then hired by someone else time and time again. But heaven forbid we keep that mail room guy, when we could just get some other low-paid worker to pick up that job for nothing.</p>
<p>hayden…love your post…</p>
<p>And in a similar vein to hayden’s post…which…did I say I love …:)</p>
<p>People in these businesses are some of the richer …wealthier people in this country…</p>
<p>What is the actual performance?</p>
<p>[Can</a> a monkey pick a hedge fund? - Portfolio Insights by Brett Arends - MarketWatch](<a href=“Can a monkey pick a hedge fund? - MarketWatch”>Can a monkey pick a hedge fund? - MarketWatch)</p>
<p>"I believe in reason, logic and the human mind, so I wish I could say the first. Alas, I have just finished reading “Assessing the Performance of Funds of Hedge Funds,” a research paper produced by Benoit Dewaele and Hugues Pirotte of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (the Brussels Free University in Belgium), and Nils Tuchschmid and Erik Wallerstein of the Geneva School of Business Administration in Switzerland. The paper is here.</p>
<p>They studied a broad sample of 1,300 funds-of-funds from 1994 through 2009, and analyzed just how much value they actually created.</p>
<p>Their core finding? When you strip out the fees, just 22% deliver any “alpha,” or risk-adjusted investment gains, at all.</p>
<p>And most of those gains came from the underlying hedge-fund indices, rather than from picking the right individual managers.</p>
<p>How many actually added value by picking the right managers, and avoiding the wrong ones?</p>
<p>According to the study, just 5.7%. That’s right. After deducting fees, just one fund in 20 actually added risk-adjusted returns above those of the underlying hedge-fund indices.</p>
<p>You couldn’t make it up.</p>
<p>Nearly half of all Fund of Hedge Fund managers, the academics report, delivered “negative after-fees alpha when benchmarked against the hedge-fund indices.” In other words they couldn’t even keep up with the index.</p>
<p>(Ah, “negative alpha.” The euphemisms we use these days. It’s enough to make you visit the nearest comfort station.)</p>
<p>The managers also compared the performance of actual fund of funds to randomly selected groups of funds. The differences were minimal.</p>
<p>They conclude that the fees associated with funds of hedge funds wipe out any added value. And their comparison of funds of hedge funds with randomly selected groups of hedge funds “would moreover suggest that such hedge-fund picking skills are on average close to non-existent in the first place.”</p>
<p>And this game isn’t penny-ante stuff either. These funds have about $560 billion invested in them, after peaking at $1.2 trillion in 2007.</p>
<p>Adding insult to injury: Most of the underlying hedge funds themselves aren’t adding value either — at least, not to the investors.</p>
<p>As Ilia Dichev at Emory University and Gwen Yu at Harvard found, after looking at hedge-fund performances over the past 30 years, the average has done worse than a stock-market index fund — and not much better than a simple basket of Treasury bonds"</p>
<p>hayden,</p>
<p>I guess I don’t understand what drives people to scrutinize the compensation of executives at private corporations. What business is it of ours what companies want to pay their employees? Are you suggesting that we pass laws to “regulate” this?</p>
<p>The reasons why many are seeing their incomes shrink and not grow is probably more to do with globalization and technology than anything else. These folks are competing with counterparts in India and Eastern Europe, etc. Top talent in technology and leadership and strategy is more immune from those pressures. In fact, often those individuals become more valuable as industries become more globalized.</p>
<p>This whole outrage over CEOs earning a lot seems stupid to me. How about basketball stars who can barely read? Reality TV stars? Pop stars? </p>
<p>That sensibility of wanting to make sure no one gets too much is very much in vogue in certain quarters at the moment. It is not, imo, becoming. Better to focus on your own work, try to be an innovator, work on being a leader and someone who is truly valuable at your place of employment instead of resenting those higher up the ladder.</p>
<p>There will always be those who get the most. Remember the USSR? Regulating who can get what is not a good idea.</p>
<p>post 106: Thank you for such a clear explanation</p>
<p>post 107: :)</p>
<h2>Do these top percent of the 1% look to the future at all? How do you think they imagine this is all going to play out? They all own personal islands? and very small armies? or is controlling the media really enough?</h2>
<p>re USSR. It doesn’t really make sense to me (ymmv) comparing pre-revolution Russia, USSR, Russia today — with history of US and capitalism.</p>
<p>Before you ask, yes I have taken a history course before
and I know a couple of Russians</p>
<p>Alh…</p>
<p>I love that question…because I have been arguing with a couple of people that if the top 1% doesn’t share part of their income and wealth…and the masses feel they don’t really have a stake in the game…</p>
<p>The masses are going to eventually support a different game…</p>
<p>And instead of those 1% giving up a little …they are going to end up giving up a lot…</p>
<p>I mentioned before…my family lost everything …when communism took over Russia and when communism took over China. Double losers…</p>
<p>But communism does not have to take over before the top 1% has problems…
It just takes a FDR…</p>
<p>I think it is going to happen.
When I look at the wealth numbers and income numbers…and the debt in the US…student debt can’t be eliminated…$1 trillion…</p>
<p>I don’t think the masses think the current economic system is fair…and once they realize the American Dream is rare…I think it is already happening…The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are just the beginning.</p>
<p>I think there are going to be huge changes in this society…</p>
<p>What do you think, alh?</p>
<p>Sewhappy…we already regulate who gets what…</p>
<p>Did you read Hayden’s post? </p>
<p>And those that regulate pay themselves the most…</p>
<p>"This whole outrage over CEOs earning a lot seems stupid to me. How about basketball stars who can barely read? Reality TV stars? Pop stars? "</p>
<p>You get something for your money with basketball stars…reality tv stars…pop stars…</p>
<p>“Some” of the these CEOs are whores. Actually…they are worse than whores…With whores…you get something for your money too…</p>
<p>dstark: I don’t really understand or know what to think which is why I am reading your threads. It is really freaking me out that I can’t seem to find any concrete numbers for how many are involved in OWS at any point in time. Is it possible with all the real time internet communication we have that there could be a revolution and no one would even know it (unless they were right there) until it was all over?</p>
<p>sewhappy seems to think the 1% are the good guys and we need to support them and their wealth. How much of the population feels like her? It feels like a lot till recently.</p>
<p>Lately, I have been thinking a lot about what I perceive as a loss of culture in Russia and China following communist takeover. But I don’t really understand anything about it. I am sure you do. It seems perhaps of greater long term consequence than loss of personal wealth.</p>
<p>edit: okay maybe not to individuals who lost wealth</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Because “we” set the laws of what is allowed and not allowed in these areas. In this case our laws allow this incestious compensation process to exist. Our laws allow venture capitals and investments bankers to paid in ways that their pay is considered capital gains and not regular income (and therefore taxes at much-much lower rates). Our laws allow investment bankers to skim off the top during IPOs so that their banks and favored customers have guaranteed profits. To me it seems many think the accumulation of wealth has been some unintended natural result of the evolving global economy … that certainly has been part of it … however a large part also has been the result of the widely effective Reagan Revolution which has systematically favored the wealthy. And at this point I have NO faith in our politicians (on either side) doing what is best for the country as opposed to favoring what special interest groups advocate.</p>
<p>Alh…I don’t understand that much about the takeovers…</p>
<p>My family saw what was happening in China…and they started to leave and come to the US…but it was hard to come here…and my family had business in China…</p>
<p>My dad and one of his 3 brothers ran the business while his parents and 2 brothers left China…the business was solid…they weren’t rich…the family owned a nice multi-unit building…</p>
<p>Then one day…my father and his brother were approached and were given an offer for their stuff that could not be refused. ;)</p>
<p>Then my dad did what was necessary to get out of the country. My dad and his brother took what they had and bought gold and stuck it in a hollowed out bed post and put the bed post in a piece of luggage…</p>
<p>And that is how they got some money out of the country…</p>
<p>One thing about my dad…He is a very happy guy. He is really a great person. He can adjust…He loves it here. He loved China…He was productive here…He is not one of the top 1%…money wise. ;)</p>
<p>^^thank you for writing that post</p>
<p>I just can’t imagine how hard it is to leave your homeland, (forever, not just temporarily) where all your “people” are buried. I visit the family cemetery and home place once a year. But obviously, lots of people leave and are happy to be able to do so.</p>
<p>It was easier for me to imagine when I was younger.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Thank you for sharing that story. It is really moving.</p>
<p>it used to be you could sew small valuables in your clothes but now you couldn’t make it through airport screening</p>
<p>I was thinking about airport screening when I was telling that story…</p>
<p>Yeah…you’re right…</p>
<p>if you are really wealthy, you’d have a boat on standby ?</p>
<p>never mind, you’d have a jet</p>
<p>okay here’s an entrepreneurial idea: boat rides for the sort-of-wealthy</p>
<p>Maybe that is why there are so many boats out here…</p>
<p>Maybe…when the time comes…somebody will let me hop aboard…:)</p>