Believe it or not, she does. The link to an Amazon.com entry is right there in the article.
In the Aurora Theater the Men Protected the Women. What Does that Mean?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/07/23/aurora_dark_knight_shooting_the_men_protected_the_women.html
Monday, July 23, 2012
Shorting Best Buy
Recently, Best Buys' (BBY-NYSE) compensation consultant quit after the company granted bonuses to a large proportion of management without any performance basis. The bonuses were granted without any ties to performance, past, present, or future.
This speculation follows immediately: Perhaps BBY did this because management believes that if it tied the bonuses to performance that it would be very difficult for their managers to meet those performance targets. Hence, the environment is so difficult that even management believes future results will be very poor. Even worse, it might be that bonuses are being given out as a kind of pre-bankruptcy severance to their hard-working employees, because management is so concerned about future earnings they can't count on cash flow to cover future bonuses. In their estimation, it is best to tap the cash reserves now, to give employees a chance to plan ahead, hunker down, build savings, just in case the business explodes over the next several years.
This is not a move that sends out signals of confidence. BBY is under assault from web-based commerce, especially Amazon.com. Most electronics, computer, music, video, and technology goods are black box products. They either work or they don't, and there is often little need for after-sales service.
I will say this about BBY employees: I usually find that they are well-informed and helpful. I've never been pressured to buy something I didn't want. Still, it doesn't take a showroom to put your name on a pre-release sales list, and 2-day shipping at no cost (Amazon Prime) beats the 8 mile drive to the nearest store any day. Unless I need it immediately. Which I rarely do.
This speculation follows immediately: Perhaps BBY did this because management believes that if it tied the bonuses to performance that it would be very difficult for their managers to meet those performance targets. Hence, the environment is so difficult that even management believes future results will be very poor. Even worse, it might be that bonuses are being given out as a kind of pre-bankruptcy severance to their hard-working employees, because management is so concerned about future earnings they can't count on cash flow to cover future bonuses. In their estimation, it is best to tap the cash reserves now, to give employees a chance to plan ahead, hunker down, build savings, just in case the business explodes over the next several years.
This is not a move that sends out signals of confidence. BBY is under assault from web-based commerce, especially Amazon.com. Most electronics, computer, music, video, and technology goods are black box products. They either work or they don't, and there is often little need for after-sales service.
I will say this about BBY employees: I usually find that they are well-informed and helpful. I've never been pressured to buy something I didn't want. Still, it doesn't take a showroom to put your name on a pre-release sales list, and 2-day shipping at no cost (Amazon Prime) beats the 8 mile drive to the nearest store any day. Unless I need it immediately. Which I rarely do.
LIBOR is not a free lunch
The latest banking scandal has some people yawning, some yapping, some yelling. Overall, there seems to be a clear lack of outrage except among those who have an incentive to find a reason to be outraged. What to think? Frankly, this case smells. All the telltales indicate that this is a false scandal. LIBOR is an interest rate derived from information volunteered by various banks periodically. What do the banks get for their effort? Nothing, really. The information they supply costs them time and effort, and they get nothing in return.
LIBOR is a free lunch, an attempt to concoct an important benchmark interest rate from voluntary statements of a few banks. What incentive do they have to tell the truth? Apparently, the incentive is jail time if they lie, and nothing if they don't. So for the bankers, it is a negative sum game. Is it any wonder that Libor Case Documents Show Timid Regulators? The regulators must have been wondering whether it was an April Fools joke. You can imagine them talking to the walls, as though the pranksters were hidden nearby: "Okay, okay, come on out guys! What's the catch? Tell me what the joke is!"
Since there is no way to predict the outcome of the investigations underway, and there is little reason for those of us who are not LIBOR experts to suddenly learn a bunch about what it is and how it works, our net investment thesis is something between short everything having to do with banks and governments and I don't care and I am going to ignore the whole thing. You could make a case that random and capricious prosecution of impolite behavior (certainly Barclay's attempted "manipulation" of LIBOR at least qualifies as impoliteness) indicates that those in the know among regulators of the financial industry are short the banks and intend for other investors to sell out at the bottom.
It could be foolish to expect that LIBOR will last much longer. Do we need a benchmark rate built on the assumption of a free handout of information?
Eliot Spitzer writes in Larry Kudlow Says the Libor Conspiracy Has No Victims. That’s Grotesquely Wrong (sorry, I misplaced the URL) that there is massive harm done in this case. People are quite astute at perceiving damage to themselves done by others. Some are astoundingly good at it, spotting eleven out of every three cases of negligence or inconvenience that occur. The remedy will be an unexpected consequence: LIBOR will go away, and we all--Spitzer, you, me, and all the other people who have mortgages and car loans--will have to rely on much fuzzier (and more expensive) estimates of short-term borrowing costs.
LIBOR is a free lunch, an attempt to concoct an important benchmark interest rate from voluntary statements of a few banks. What incentive do they have to tell the truth? Apparently, the incentive is jail time if they lie, and nothing if they don't. So for the bankers, it is a negative sum game. Is it any wonder that Libor Case Documents Show Timid Regulators? The regulators must have been wondering whether it was an April Fools joke. You can imagine them talking to the walls, as though the pranksters were hidden nearby: "Okay, okay, come on out guys! What's the catch? Tell me what the joke is!"
Since there is no way to predict the outcome of the investigations underway, and there is little reason for those of us who are not LIBOR experts to suddenly learn a bunch about what it is and how it works, our net investment thesis is something between short everything having to do with banks and governments and I don't care and I am going to ignore the whole thing. You could make a case that random and capricious prosecution of impolite behavior (certainly Barclay's attempted "manipulation" of LIBOR at least qualifies as impoliteness) indicates that those in the know among regulators of the financial industry are short the banks and intend for other investors to sell out at the bottom.
It could be foolish to expect that LIBOR will last much longer. Do we need a benchmark rate built on the assumption of a free handout of information?
Eliot Spitzer writes in Larry Kudlow Says the Libor Conspiracy Has No Victims. That’s Grotesquely Wrong (sorry, I misplaced the URL) that there is massive harm done in this case. People are quite astute at perceiving damage to themselves done by others. Some are astoundingly good at it, spotting eleven out of every three cases of negligence or inconvenience that occur. The remedy will be an unexpected consequence: LIBOR will go away, and we all--Spitzer, you, me, and all the other people who have mortgages and car loans--will have to rely on much fuzzier (and more expensive) estimates of short-term borrowing costs.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Government didn't build that
There are a lot of Government employees and elected officials who draw paychecks. Many of them attribute their positions of privilege and power to their own intelligence and correct political beliefs. But their seemingly justifiable perches over the people is an illusion. There are a lot of smart citizens out there. Let me tell you something, there are a whole bunch of hard working entrepreneurs and skilled workers in America.
If you were elected to office, a lot of people along the line gave you a lot of help. There was a businessman or inventor somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American engine of production and commerce that thrived despite Government intervention. All of the money that Government spent on roads and bridges, that came from hard working people and entreprenuers. Contractors with expertise and skills built them, the Government didn't. If you are in a local, or state, or the national Government, you didn't build that. The PEOPLE and BUSINESS made that happen.
If you were elected to office, a lot of people along the line gave you a lot of help. There was a businessman or inventor somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American engine of production and commerce that thrived despite Government intervention. All of the money that Government spent on roads and bridges, that came from hard working people and entreprenuers. Contractors with expertise and skills built them, the Government didn't. If you are in a local, or state, or the national Government, you didn't build that. The PEOPLE and BUSINESS made that happen.
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