Wages/Profits
June 8, 2008 5:30pm by Barry Ritholtz
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Pete Peterson on Charlie Rose
lol. a distant second to the black swan. do you think friday’s selloff counts as validation of that call?
Next week is probably going to be a rough week. Take a few minutes, go to this site and have a few laughs. I love this guy. Hope you do too.
http://www.funniestman.com/media/library/qtplayer.php
Sorry.
The correct address is: http://www.funniestman.com/media/library/
I just read this. I believe this shoe fits:
Soon I’ll be dead
by Grandpa
June 2, 2008 PERMANENT LINK
Have I mentioned lately that I’m increasingly glad that I’m old? Soon I’ll be dead (nothing fatal, just an actuarial statement — I’m 70, almost as old as John McCain, so I’m a lot closer to the end than the beginning).
The country I grew up in has already been killed and buried, and the criminals who killed it are getting away with it.
My father was killed defending America from real enemies in World War II. My older brother was killed in Korea, and they told him he was defending America too, but I never figured out what he was defending America from. I was lucky enough to be a Marine while America was between wars, but my son was killed in Vietnam, and again, you tell me what his death had to do with defending America. Nothing, like the nothing our boys are fighting and dying for in Iraq today and Iran tomorrow.
Shouldn’t it at least take a pretty clever criminal mind to sink a nation, loot the treasury, launch outlandish phony wars, and get away with everything? These crooks Bush and Cheney don’t seem terribly bright and they did everything in broad daylight… on television… but nobody seems to want them punished except a huge majority of little people like you and me and Helen and Harry. The people in power, people in Congress and in the media who really could punish this gang of low-life thugs, they’re just always conveniently looking the other way like little kids told to face the wall. They’ll be staring at that wall right up until it crumbles on them.
Everything I ever believed in has been completely trashed and the traitors who did this to America are laughing as they get away with it all.
But on the bright side pretty soon I’ll be dead, and make my way out of here.
I’ll get to escape the ugliness they’ve built where the United States of America used to be.
You poor suckers are stuck here.
Grandpa ”
unknownnews.org
Morale of the story: When everyone tries to be a predator, everyone becomes prey.
What happens when the guy with the briefcase gets to the top of the escalator?
He has a monetarial orgasm.
Well, there is your problem, like the “profit building”, you got to place the “wages” at publicly visible outside walls to attract the needed attention.
I guess if “Grandpa” was chump enough to believe that we had ‘real'( Hey, who funded & baited them? ) enemies during WWII, he was chump enough to be complicit, throughout his Adult life, in creating the WOS (as he, now, sees it) that he’s so happy to be soon leaving..
Or, differently, that type of Garbage is nothing more than a piece of agitprop, from PsyOps Central, to breed dispondency, and despair, among its readership base…
AGG, I would have bet that you knew better..
Past that, that Cartoonist, if this work is a representative sample, is a gifted illustrator. Only, too, bad, he didn’t give a shout out to M.C. Escher..
http://www.mcescher.com/
What happens when the guy with the briefcase gets to the top of the escalator?
He puts the money in a safe and comes back with the empty suitcase to get more money from the 4 fellows
the picture fails to show the workers climbing a staircase that’s actually moving in the opposite direction of the escalator…
I see where the cartoonist was going with this but it will be essentially the same underlying message in simpler terms, if he just had:
– a worker walking up the stairs
– company profits taking up the escalator
– executives taking the elevator
5, 15, 50 units above the ground floor respectively, and all in the “income building”
Fine, I will stop over analyzing it
are PROFITS going up???
What’s really missing are the dollars that should be falling out of the worker’s pockets and landing on a conveyor belt that conveniently takes the money to the bottom of the ‘stock market’ escalator.
To underscore my recurring theme on the dumbing down of America, McCain wants to cut corporate tax rates. Excuse me, aren’t profit margins at an all time high, aren’t corporations cutting capital expenditures, aren’t executive salaries and compensation at an all time high, and aren’t workers wages stagnant? The issue is not McCain, but the fact that someone running for president should be called for pandering to corps for donations with a really loopy policy proposal.
Exactly Singer. Most companies are unable to figure out how to pass costs to the consumer.
Example, The family and mysef went out for a steak at an average well known chain this weekend. An average steak dinner that was 17 18 bucks is now 25 bucks. Place was half empty at 5:00. Wheels are falling off this puppy!
Companies with slim margins are toast. Profits my Arsh. Massive job losses around the corner.
Mark E Hoffer: Look at the small print next to the artist’s signature. The attribution is there …
Next time your really worried about flag burning, or really extra concerned about gay rights, or your thinking about the long term consequences of pro-life vs. pro-choice…
Ask yourself, why, if drilling in ANWR is so important didn’t the GOP allow drilling when they had complete control of the White House and Congress? Why didn’t they? Hmmm….
The answer is, for all of the above: so that you’ll have someone to blame when their policies fail. So the suckers will blame the enviros when the lost production out of Iraq is many times the max potential from ANWR. OK, got it now?
Wages down? We need a “free market,” Oh yeah? How come there’s no “free market” in proxy voting for CEO pay, no free market in board selection, all those poison pills? What are your pension plans doing? What are your mutual funds doing while your wages go no where?
Vote.
Great picture. About says it all.
So it was… But I think the escalator ride is over.
The cartoon doesn’t quite jive with this Big Picture post from May.
In regards to whether the shareholders (“capital”) will get screwed: given that the average bonus (“workers”) at Goldman Sachs last year was $300 THOUSAND! (huh, on average that includes secretaries?)…[re: Main Street America, is this reasonable???]…For Barry: Will shareholders of Lehman, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman be passive “plankton” amidst the “sharks”–or as these firms deleverage their business models, demand that the abnormal profits of the “laborers” go to “capital” (shareholders) instead???
cm,
I see it now, that you pointed it out, though, contrast: “Look at the small print next to the artist’s signature”, with:
“too, bad, he didn’t give a shout out to M.C. Escher”
the image, partially, Is a wholesale lift from, said, M. C. Escher. It would held them, both, in good stead if Matson gave him greater recognition..
Really, no biggie, I, hardly, think it a Tort..
Though, again, past that, Singer asks a telling Q.. Do we, really, think we are producing Economic Profits, or, Are we willing to accept, merely, Financial Profits and pretend that the Wizard will separate us from the ill-winds of the Natural World?
Singer, mark to fantasy profits are going up.
Title: the Hedonic Treadmill
Mark Hoffer, please use less commas, your posts give me hiccups.
I like the cartoon but I think it is more representative of the late 90s. As matt10011 pointed out, today it should have just an escalator with people labeled “top management” standing still and going up on the left, and workers and shareholders on the right walking down (ie working but not moving).
“What happens when the guy with the briefcase gets to the top of the escalator?”
Thats why they call it “the Golden Parachute”.