Price of tin gods ( Discounted! )

John Thain in his excuse for giving out bonuses to Merrill Lynch hacks in the middle of a corporate meltdown was that top talent would march to other companies. Sure. Go ahead. Tired, broken, worn-out Reaganesque style obsolete American corporate talent - walk - look for comparable employment - welcome to the real world!!! (It’s a bitch!)

President Obama in an attempt to restore reality ( sanity would be too much to ask even from him ) to the corporate boardrooms in America, set a maximum salary cap for senior executives in failed corporations. If your bankrupt hack company wants a government handout - guess what - the talent that caused the meltdown is not worth millions a year in salary - just thousands. What a refreshing breeze has whofted over the land of America suddenly.

As for talent, a few MBAs got decent salaries for their slide rule approach to ransacking corporations and putting it all neatly onto a spreadsheet to act as ponzi cover to quarterly reports and paper profits, bonuses, corporate jets, Caribbean weekends, drugs and hookers!

The quarterly report scam thing has been going on for over a quarter of a century. Can’t we just keep up appearances for a few more quarters? “Hell I even had money with Madoff!” goes the line of many sad songs on the corporate penthouse world built not on factories but more like Blow.

I have a pint of air. I invest in that pint of air and declare that it has increased in value to half a quart. I declare a dividend. Borrow money from giant useless banks to pay the dividend and I am in business. Bring on the last few remaining state and municipal pension funds to invest in my air corporation. Not many suckers left to fleece in America or globally.

Oh the Pubs fucked up real bad when they couldn’t get the Average American Joe to break off from Social Security and invest his government nest egg in Wall Street.

Bush dropped the ball on that one. The American people will sort of go along with national security and wars in the middle east but don’t touch my privates - my Social Security thingy.

It is still a mess in America with many more quarters before real corporations declare real profits and start hiring native born Americans back at a living wage. But one thing for sure is that the Tin Gods of Wall Street just got a deflationary wake up call as to their Titanic views of themselves and their supposed talents.

It is a new day dawning in corporate America. I can smell the coffee above the pollution free future of electric cars on the newly built highways, solar power on my roof and a realization that reality starts with real things and not theoretical corporate spreadsheet profits, Keating, Lay and Madoff style.

Audit Reform on Wall Street Needed Immediately

What I remember seeing on TV last night was something like real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman handing a check for thirty million dollars to an investment manager and then that investment manager turned around and outsourced it immediately to Bernard Madoff, ponzi king. Thirty million I am sure with some effort earned got pissed away in a few seconds.

I do not wish to criticize Mr. Zuckerman but I do wish to criticize the casual laissez faire way that Wall Street has been managed and audited for decades. No doubt the old boy’s image of frat house brothers covering each other butts in the market place with insider tips and growing rich together for being ahead of the investment curve is as true as it might be unfair.

The boomer generation and its dream to retire in wealth and not need the poverty dole of living on a social security check has been the goal of so many. In recent months the blatant mismanagement and now outright fraud of so much money and retirement funds of others being pissed away in a few seconds is not myth. It is real.

What I do not understand is that with all the speed and sophistication of computers, why can’t you get a print out in a few second to show where everything is or should be in the inventory of cash, securities and liabilities.

To blame the Securities and Exchange Commission is to blame the wind.

These securities companies have enough confidence to outsource a great number of jobs to Asia from the United States and with the help and sophistication of computers and programming.

When it comes to doing an audit in any of these financial institutions, they would have you believe that a clerk with a green shade on his forehead and picking his nose is the person to see when you want to see or understand the workings of the financial operations. Bullshit!

The lack of any standard programming or instant audit reporting to the SEC in a flash of the speed of light is the step and fetch it response of the old boy’s network that make a fraud the size of Madoff’s fraud possible.

There was a story in 1995 about an old lady that died beyond 100 and who had lost everything in the 1929 stock market crash. This woman over six decades managed to accumulate a fortune of $22 million in the stock market which she bequeathed to Yeshiva University for women’s studies. I hope that Anne Scheiber’s bequest to women did not get pissed away last week or last year or in the last decade because of Bernard Madoff and the Duh crowd managing assets on Wall Street with a wink, nod and secret hand shake.

I hope that Mr. Zuckerman with his power in the communications industry will take a personal interest in the Anne Scheibers and Jane and John Q. Publics and the protection of assets on Wall Street. The archaic methods of audit and reputation has got to be replaced with 21st century standardized computer and asset reporting to a new overhauled SEC under the next administration.

There may be a silver lining in this recent tragedy and fraud of so many charitable institutions and individual investors.

Hedge Fund Blowout on Wall Street

Who can you trust anymore?

There is this Hedge Fund Blowout on Wall Street. A thought to be very trusted guy with a lot of credentials, track record and street experience has been accused of running a Ponzi scam with a projected loss of $50 billion dollars to investors.

The investors appear to be very rich and famous people as well as charitable trusts. Also Banco Santander of Spain appears as of this writing to have a $3 billion exposure and probable loss in this matter.

I wrote something in March entitled Big Bank, as an Ezine Article.

---To a simple person such as myself, big words like derivatives, kind of go over my head. I am reminded of a former bank that I worked for. For the sack of political politeness, let us call this defunct Wall Street dinosaur Big Bank. This is going back over twenty years.

Big Bank started to sell new fangled derivatives to their best customers until their best customers got burned. I remember news through the grapevine said that the CEO told his traders and brokers to go out and find some more big customers to replace the ones they just lost with this new Chinese checker style financing. Guess what. Word was out on the street. Nobody wanted to do strange business with Big Bank anymore.

Big Bank no longer exists. It got sold to a foreign bank that knew how to treat its customers.

What I am seeing on Wall Street these recent days is two things.

One, pyramid or ponzi schemes all eventually fail. You run out of suckers who trust the sell and end up with a terrible loss or pay out.

Two, big banks, traditional and so called investment banks, all are hiding so called assets on their books. Why hide them? Well greed is one answer. If you never report the assets, the government cannot tax the profits.

The recent scenario in banks going belly up is not necessarily the result of deregulation.

The government, a slow lumbering giant, cannot regulate new or hidden forms of so called creative investment.

Now that the Social Security Trust Fund is indirectly bailing out all these marvelously lousy, incredibly stupid, non traditional fiscally irresponsible investment schemes, maybe it is time for big government to call a truce, work out what taxes if any it is willing to put on these new ponzi investment schemes and hedge funds.

The old adage about alcohol and tobacco should be applied. Legalize whatever it is you are doing in secret and tax the sin (hell) out of it!

The truth will set you free.

If you are such good business leaders, why are you hiding your activity? Are these legendary CEO bonuses co-conspirator bribes and not true earnings? Are you legitimate businesses or do you in your hearts fear Rico style investigation of your new global Enron styled accounting enterprises?

Duh!---

Not to pat myself on the back. A lot of people saw this tragedy coming and unfolding.

But nobody listens or learns. Nobody thinks that they can get burnt or get caught.

I assume that the business schools do not teach the History of Business Failure as in John Bunting and First Pennsylvania Bank or the Savings and Loan Scandal caused by deregulation in the late eighties or NOW! They should teach something like that along with their so called “ethics” course.

The irony of this whole thing and I know I might sound dumb saying this - maybe this Madoff guy was doing business the same way Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch etc. were doing business - the only problem that Madoff ran into with his ponzi scheme - and he probably did not know it was a ponzi scheme - he was just performing the normal way Wall Street has done business for the last thirty years - shell games, three card monty - ?

That the real problem Madoff had in the end was probalby the credit crunch caused by big corporate dinosaurs lying about assets and borrowing, borrowing, borrowing.

The Fed can't keep printing money indefinitely.

I knew the system was broken when they got a little fish - Martha Stewart - for $60,000 profit on insider trading related matters – obstruction of justice.

The whole freaking industry is a nest of good ole boys - insider tips - brokers and bankers skimming the system with fees, commissions and bonuses until the geese that laid the golden eggs - Freddie and Fannie - could not find any more bodies including the ones in funeral parlors to sign off on and buy sub prime mortgages.

Who is going to be honest when commissions and bonues are involved? Do you really think that anyboby will work for a $100K salary and a $50K bonus when you can opt for a $100K salary and a $10 million dollar annual bonus?

Hey! Hello! We are talking about human nature here. The so called free market capitialism B.S. is like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny - a nice story to tell kiddies or the public but get real - your broker has only one agenda - his/her own!

Oh well!

Si La Vie!

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put” - Wall Street back together again.