A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year -- and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation's millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday...
"...[S]tate and local government employees earn less total compensation than their private sector counterparts with similar education, training, and work experience."
Big headlines come across my desk each morning, but none more sensational than this one from Wednesday: “Bloated public sector needs a crash diet” (The Examiner). As I skimmed the article, I read: “While much of the private sector has laid off workers, frozen pay and cut capital investment, public sector employees have lived high on the tax-fattened hog.” This editorial is just one of many causing a stir about public compensation as the recession tightens its grip. The most infamous story came from Bell, California, where the city of 37,000 paid several top employees egregious salaries, including $800,000 to the chief administrative officer. While this kind of abuse is out of the ordinary, it does raise a fair question about public compensation.
In a series of articles, USA Today (most recently on August 10, 2010) similarly asserts that public sector employees are overcompensated compared with their private sector counterparts. Their analysis compares the salaries of similar occupations in each sector, accountants to accountants, for example. While this approach may seem logical, a new report, commissioned by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence (CSLGE) and the National Institute on Retirement Security, declares that the reality is that 80 percent of private positions do not have direct public sector equivalents.
For the 20 percent of occupations that allow comparison, then, USA Today relays only the raw salary differences that suggest higher earnings for state and local workers. This means that their analysis fails to factor in other qualifying factors of comparison between employees, like education level, years of experience, training, and skill sets. So while both USA Today and the new CSLGE report confirm that public employees do, in fact, earn more on average than private sector workers, the public sector workforce earns this higher average salary because the average employee is better educated and has more experience. Once these factors are included in compensation calculations, the latter explains that state and local government employees earn less total compensation than their private sector counterparts with similar education, training, and work experience.
In fact, the CSLGE report discovered that state and local sector employees are twice as likely as their private sector counterparts to have a college or advanced degree. The major driver in this pattern is that government workers have jobs that demand more education, like teachers, university professors, nurses, and social workers. In other words, state and local government employees earn less than they would if they took their skills to the private sector.
How much less?...With benefits factored in, state and local employees still earned an average of nearly 7 percent and 7.4 percent less, respectively...
In a report to be released on Friday, Kenneth R. Feinberg, the Obama administration’s special master for executive compensation, is expected to name 17 financial companies that made questionable payouts totaling $1.58 billion immediately after accepting billions of dollars of taxpayer aid, according to two government officials with knowledge of his findings who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the report.
The group includes Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and the American International Group as well as small lenders like Boston Private Financial Holdings. Mr. Feinberg’s report points to companies that he says paid eye-popping amounts or used haphazard criteria for awarding bonuses, the people with knowledge of his findings said, and he has singled out Citigroup as the biggest offender...
As I struggle to understand exactly how and why financial institutions inflicted so much damage on the American economy, I appreciate articles like this one from NPR.
Today, a conversation with New York Times financial editor Gretchen Morgenson, who has covered the world financial markets since 1998. She'll be discussing what's going on with Goldman Sachs, the Justice Department, and the SEC.
...Ms. MORGENSON: What the SEC really is saying is that they have omitted a material detail in the selling of this security. Here's how it was created. It was created with a very big hedge fund that was a client of Goldman Sachs.
It was called the Paulson and Company Hedge Fund, and it was run by a man named John Paulson, who has subsequently become very famous for making billions of dollars betting against subprime mortgages when people were still sort of thinking everything was fine.
Now, he and Goldman put together this portfolio of mortgages that were then sold to Goldman's clients. But the element that is at the crux of the case is Mr. Paulson had interest in this portfolio being filled with sort of toxic mortgages, mortgages that were less likely to perform well, that were really sort of on the precipice already.
So was it right for Goldman Sachs to sell such a portfolio to its clients without disclosing that this person who was selecting the portfolio had a negative bet on and was therefore opposed to the people who were buying it, who were hoping that it would perform and that the mortgages would continue to pay?
GROSS: So the suit names Fabrice Tourre, who is a vice president at Goldman, who helped create and sell these derivatives. How come the suit doesn't name the hedge fund manager who helped create the derivative and then betted against it?
Ms. MORGENSON: Well, John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who is involved, did not have a duty to disclose to investors his role in it because he was not selling the securities...
The financial crisis has devastated schools and the economy--so why are Republicans fighting reform? Answer: campaign contributions. But it looks like a few Republicans care more about our economy and our democracy than they do about corporate lobbyists. Let's hope they stand firm.
The battle is only half won with the vote below in the House of Representatives. The Senate still has to agree.
The House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a landmark overhaul of financial regulations but the Senate put off action until mid-July, delaying a final victory for President Barack Obama.
Still, the 237 to 192 vote in the House marked a win for Obama and his fellow Democrats, who have made the most sweeping rewrite of Wall Street rules since the 1930s a top priority in the wake of the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
"It has been a long fight against the defenders of the status quo on Wall Street, but today's vote is a victory for every American who has been affected by the recklessness and irresponsibility that led to the loss of millions of jobs and trillions in wealth," Obama said in a statement.
Analysts say Obama is all but certain to get the measure on his desk eventually, but Democrats' hopes of sending him a bill to sign into law by the July 4 Independence Day holiday were dashed.
The death of Democratic Senator Robert Byrd and cold feet among Republican allies has complicated efforts to round up the votes needed in the Senate. A week-long break following the July 4 holiday means the Senate won't act until the week of July 12, at the earliest..
Obama earlier on Wednesday accused Republicans of being out of touch with the American people for opposing reforms. Others echoed his line of attack on the House floor.
"Republicans have sided with big Wall Street banks at every opportunity," said Democratic Representative Luis Guitierrez. "If it helps Wall Street banks, they favor it, but if it helps Main Street and regular Americans, they won't vote for it."...
Our financial system failed us in 2008. One of the biggest victims has been our school system. Why don't Republicans agree that we need financial reform?
U.S. lawmakers hammered out a historic overhaul of financial regulations as dawn broke over the nation's capital on Friday, handing President Barack Obama a major domestic policy victory on the eve of a global summit devoted to financial reform.
In a marathon session of more than 21 hours, legislators agreed to a rewrite of Wall Street rules that may crimp the industry's profits and subject it to tougher oversight and tighter restrictions.
To secure agreement, lawmakers reached deals in the final hours on the most controversial sections which restrict derivatives dealing by banks and curb their proprietary trading to shield taxpayer-backed deposits from more risky activities.
Banks will be allowed to keep most swaps dealing activity in-house, although the riskiest trading would be pushed out...
...A senator sworn in five months ago owns the swing vote on the most important financial reform legislation in decades.
Brown's concerns are strictly parochial. On the one hand, he wants mutual funds and insurance companies exempted from the Volcker rule. Not uncoincidentally, such exemptions would apply to major Massachusetts-based financial institutions such as Fidelity and MassMutual...
...[C]orporate interests are balking at even modest changes from the permissiveness of the Bush era.
From the outside, this rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect? The financial industry, in particular, ran wild under deregulation, eventually bringing on a crisis that has left 15 million Americans unemployed, and required large-scale taxpayer-financed bailouts to avoid an even worse outcome. Did Wall Street expect to emerge from all that without facing some new restrictions? Apparently it did.
So what President Obama and his party now face isn’t just, or even mainly, an opposition grounded in right-wing populism. For grass-roots anger is being channeled and exploited by corporate interests, which will be the big winners if the G.O.P. does well in November.
If this sounds familiar, it should: it’s the same formula the right has been using for a generation. Use identity politics to whip up the base; then, when the election is over, give priority to the concerns of your corporate donors. Run as the candidate of “real Americans,” not those soft-on-terror East coast liberals; then, once you’ve won, declare that you have a mandate to privatize Social Security. It comes as no surprise to learn that American Crossroads, a new organization whose goal is to deploy large amounts of corporate cash on behalf of Republican candidates, is the brainchild of none other than Karl Rove.
But won’t the grass-roots rebel at being used? Don’t count on it. Last week Rand Paul, the Tea Party darling who is now the Republican nominee for senator from Kentucky, declared that the president’s criticism of BP over the disastrous oil spill in the gulf is “un-American,” that “sometimes accidents happen.” The mood on the right may be populist, but it’s a kind of populism that’s remarkably sympathetic to big corporations...
The U.S. Justice Department has dropped a probe of American International Group Inc executives involving the credit default swaps that sent the insurer to the brink of bankruptcy and forced a huge taxpayer bailout, lawyers for the executives said on Saturday.
The investigation had centered on AIG Financial Products, which nearly brought down the giant insurer after writing tens of billions of dollars on insurance-like contracts on complex securities backed by mortgages that turned out to be toxic.
The U.S. government stepped in with a $182 billion bailout to avert a bankruptcy filing by AIG.
The criminal probe had focused on whether Joseph Cassano, who ran the financial products unit, and Andrew Forster, his deputy, knowingly misled investors about the company's accounting losses on its credit default swaps portfolio...
The Wall Street Journal first reported on Friday that the two-year investigation, one of the highest profile of the various probes stemming from the 2008 financial meltdown, had been dropped.
The FBI and other government agencies had been looking into whether Cassano misled investors with overly optimistic forecasts about the extent of the firm's exposure to securities backed by risky subprime mortgages.
Investigators were said to have focused on a December 2007 investor presentation at which Cassano played down the market value of losses on the credit default swaps.
Over the course of the next year, AIG took writedowns of more than $40 billion on the swaps and had to put up billions more in collateral to counterparties like Goldman Sachs.
Cassano resigned under pressure in March 2008 as AIG's financial situation began to weaken...
Fabrice Tourre comes across as an arrogant investment banker in the Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against him and his employer Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
But personal emails released by Goldman /quotes/comstock/13*!gs/quotes/nls/gs (GS 151.93, -5.47, -3.48%) this weekend show Tourre struggling with "ethical questions" as he sold complex mortgage-related securities that he worried were suspect.
The SEC charged Goldman with securities fraud on April 16, alleging the investment bank didn't tell investors in a collateralized debt obligation that hedge fund firm Paulson & Co. helped structure the deal and was betting against it. Goldman and Paulson have denied wrongdoing. Read about the charges.
The SEC also charged Tourre, an executive director in Structured Products Group Trading, with securities fraud, alleging he was mainly responsible for the CDO, known as ABACUS 2007-AC1. Pamela Chepiga, an attorney for Tourre, declined to comment.
In the suit, the SEC quoted a January 2007 email that Tourre sent to a friend.
"More and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now...Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre]...
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- As the 2008 financial crisis was developing, top Securities and Exchange Commission employees and contractors were using government computers on official time to view pornography, according to an SEC inspector general.
The SEC's inspector general found that 33 employees or contractors violated commission rules and policies by viewing porn, according to a memo obtained Friday by MarketWatch. The investigation was requested by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
The memo reported incidents by year:
*
2010: 3 so far *
2009: 10 *
2008: 16 *
2007: 2 *
2006: 1 *
2005: 1
The 33 employees cited in the memo represent less than 1% of the SEC's approximately 4,000 employees. Of those employees, 17 were senior officials whose salaries ranged from $100,000 to $222,000, according to the memo. It isn't clear if the employees discussed in the memo were involved in oversight matters related to the financial crisis.
According to the memo, a regional office supervisory staff accountant admitted he frequently viewed pornography at work on his SEC computer for about a year and accessed pornography on his SEC-issued laptop computer while on official government travel.
Another regional office supervisory staff accountant admitted that he used an SEC assigned computer to access Websites containing pornography and other sexually explicit material during work hours fairly frequently, sometimes twice a day, according to the memo.
Another regional office staff accountant received 16,000 access denials for Internet websites classified by the SEC's Internet filter as "Sex" or "porn" in a one-month period. "In addition, the hard drive of this employee's SEC laptop contained numerous sexually suggestive and inappropriate images," the memo said.
A senior attorney at the SEC's headquarters in Washington admitted accessing Internet port so frequently that, according to the memo, on some days, he spent eight hours accessing Internet porn.
"In fact, this attorney downloaded so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office," the memo said.
Rep. Darrell Issa , R-Calif., the Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he was disturbed by the findings.
"It is nothing short of disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at pornography than taking action to help stave off the events that brought our nation's economy to the brink of collapse," he said in a statement. "This stunning report should make everyone question the wisdom of moving forward with plans to give regulators like the SEC even more widespread authority. Inexplicably, rather than exercise its existing regulatory enforcement authority, SEC officials were preoccupied with other distractions."
Ronald D. Orol is a MarketWatch reporter, based in Washington.
I know you'll all be comforted, as I was Wednesday, by the public vote of confidence from Steve Schwartzman, chief executive of private equity giant Blackstone Group, when he said that his firm would continue to do business with Goldman Sachs and that he's never had a shred of doubt about the investment bank's ethical character.
So let me get this straight. Goldman Sachs is now relying on the character reference of a Wall Street sharpie who notoriously snookered investors into buying non-controlling shares of a private equity firm at the very moment when a credit-induced takeover bubble was about to burst...
President Obama challenged some of the nation’s most influential bankers on Thursday to call off their “battalions of financial industry lobbyists” and embrace a new regulatory structure meant to avert another economic crisis.
Speaking in the bankers’ backyard, at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, Mr. Obama castigated a “failure of responsibility” by Wall Street for having led to the financial crisis of 2008, and he pressed his case for what he called “a common-sense, reasonable, non-ideological” system of tighter regulation to prevent any recurrence. He took issue with the claim that his proposal would institutionalize the idea of future bailouts of huge banks.
“That may make for a good sound bite, but it’s not factually accurate,” Mr. Obama said. “It is not true. In fact, the system as it stands is what led to a series of massive, costly taxpayer bailouts...
The court-appointed examiner who dissected the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy is expected to criticize the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday for its decision to “stand by idly” as the investment bank veered toward collapse.
The S.E.C. knew that Lehman did not have adequate liquidity and had exceeded its own limits on risk-taking but in essence did nothing, the examiner, Anton R. Valukas, will say in testimony released in advance by the House Financial Services Committee.
One of the most damning findings in Mr. Valukas’s 2,209-page report last month — that Lehman used accounting gimmicks to hide the extent of its indebtedness — was not known to the S.E.C. He wrote: “I saw nothing in my investigation to suggest that the S.E.C. asked even the most fundamental questions that might have uncovered this practice early on, before Lehman escalated it to a $50 billion issue.” ...
Bankers don't seem to be feeling any remorse for triggering the biggest financial crisis since the Depression and then getting bailed out by the government. They're not going to take it anymore! Well, they might take more money, but they're not going to put up with regulations and limits on their bonuses.
Fed up with name-calling and increased restrictions from the Obama administration, bankers are shifting financial support to Democratic opponents in the Republican party.
Bank officials say Wall Street is sending a message: “The expectation in Washington is that ‘We can kick you around, and you are still going to give us money,’ ” one top official at a major Wall Street firm tells the Times.
...this year Chase’s political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts...
The official Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — the group that aims to hold a modern version of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, whose investigations set the stage for New Deal bank regulation — began taking testimony on Wednesday. In its first panel, the commission grilled four major financial-industry honchos. What did we learn?
Well, if you were hoping for a Perry Mason moment — a scene in which the witness blurts out: “Yes! I admit it! I did it! And I’m glad!” — the hearing was disappointing. What you got, instead, was witnesses blurting out: “Yes! I admit it! I’m clueless!”
O.K., not in so many words. But the bankers’ testimony showed a stunning failure, even now, to grasp the nature and extent of the current crisis. And that’s important: It tells us that as Congress and the administration try to reform the financial system, they should ignore advice coming from the supposed wise men of Wall Street, who have no wisdom to offer.
Consider what has happened so far: The U.S. economy is still grappling with the consequences of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; trillions of dollars of potential income have been lost; the lives of millions have been damaged, in some cases irreparably, by mass unemployment; millions more have seen their savings wiped out; hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, will lose essential health care because of the combination of job losses and draconian cutbacks by cash-strapped state governments.
And this disaster was entirely self-inflicted. This isn’t like the stagflation of the 1970s, which had a lot to do with soaring oil prices, which were, in turn, the result of political instability in the Middle East. This time we’re in trouble entirely thanks to the dysfunctional nature of our own financial system. Everyone understands this — everyone, it seems, except the financiers themselves.
There were two moments in Wednesday’s hearing that stood out. One was when Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase declared that a financial crisis is something that “happens every five to seven years. We shouldn’t be surprised.” In short, stuff happens, and that’s just part of life.
But the truth is that the United States managed to avoid major financial crises for half a century after the Pecora hearings were held and Congress enacted major banking reforms. It was only after we forgot those lessons, and dismantled effective regulation, that our financial system went back to being dangerously unstable...
