But, it's not that simple... Saying, "don't have kids at a young age" is helpful, sure, but it's only helpful if the person you're telling it to has the education to know what it takes to get pregnant, access to contraceptives, or even the cultural norms to prevent it. Saying "don't drop out of high school" is really great if your kids can afford *not* to drop out of high school. Poor kids may NEED to work for money (to eat) when other kids are going to high school. They may be going to a school where it's physically dangerous to attend. They may not have effective teachers. Maybe they have no way to get to school.
So yes, telling kids these things is all great, but there are a LOT of other factors the influence how and why people make decisions that they do, and more than that, but what happens to people even outside of their decisions. Your children are obviously privileged that they're growing up in a nurturing, supportive environment, where they have the luxury of making good decisions. That's great. But for so many other people, that's not realistic or practical.
My wife came from a housing project in the south Bronx. The people who live there have no end of problems but they still know what they have to do to succeed. Her brother went to Catholic school "because he needed the discipline", she went to public school. He had his first kid at 19, went to jail for drugs the first time at 21, has been struggling ever since (while having 3 more kids with 3 different women). She studied and got out.
If you asked him he would tell you flat out how his bad choices messed up his life and the lives of his kids. Don't make excuses for him, it pisses off his kids.
Kid, you have spent too much time reading Ayn Rand. As you get older, if you're smart and open to ideas, you'll learn that it ain't as simple as you describe.
There are a LOT of other factors that go into whether or not a person is successful in the US other than the few you describe.
I won't call you a "fucking LIAR", but I will call you ignorant. Luckily, that IS something you can remedy on your own. Best of luck, snowflake.
It's not a guarantee of success, any more than using condoms guarantees no pregnancies or STD's. But you wouldn't argue against condom use just because sometimes people who use them still create babies.
Is there really anything in the advice given that you would argue against? I've given my kids more or less the same advice. Their future is an open book filled with promise, as long as they don't do anything fatally stupid like creating a baby, getting a record, dropping out of high school, getting drug addicted, etc. Do you advise your kids otherwise?
So I gave him a call to let him know what messages I was sending it when it crashed. I called him up and said, "Hey, Phil, I just got a child died event..."
*Click*. He hung up the phone.
I called back. No answer.
My co-worker, sitting next to me, told me that I really fucked up. "How so?" "Phil's kid died about 2 months ago. SIDS."
With all sympathy for Phil's tragic loss, this path leads nowhere. Anything you say can remind someone of a painful life event. Are people supposed to stop talking about "children" in any context around Phil? Put curtains up concealing schoolsl? Ban walking kids in strollers? Stop selling baby stuff on Amazon? Pull all the baby food and Pampers from the supermarket?
It's crazy. Phil has to cope without taking it out on the innocent people around him.
Excessive hype is always followed by a trough of disillusionment. But as the TOD fades, plenty of mature, practical applications are likely to emerge. The technological naysayers are usually even more wrong than the hypesters.
Back in the early PC days, when you had to hook up a cassette player to load your application, and then another one to load your data, we used to tell people they could store recipes on their TRS-80 personal computer. This was not much of a productivity enhancer. I'm sure based on this experience some people would have thought PC's were useless and had no future.
And then floppy disks and spreadsheets were invented.
Distributed teams can't just get together in a physical conference room We have to meet on conference calls.
Tell that to free software projects, that have teams scattered around the globe only coordinated through e-mail.
My son is involved with a global free project. They have group video chats all the time
Regardless I don't think you can compare a voluntary distributed team having loose deliverable schedules with a commercial project. I'm in NY, and I meet daily with my Poland and UK teams. One conference call can be more effective than a week of email.
From that article: "I applied for the job through the jobcentre. I’ve thought about quitting, but I can’t leave of my own accord. If I did, I’d be sanctioned by the jobcentre and lose my entitlement for benefits and support for six months. I don’t have much choice but to carry on working there. Unless I can find a new job, I’m locked into place."
He's not on welfare because he works at Amazon. He's working at Amazon so he can stay on welfare!
Distributed teams can't just get together in a physical conference room We have to meet on conference calls. As for who is on the call, we use Skype for business. It shows you who is on the call and who is talking.
If I don't have anything to contribute and am not interested in the discussion I decline the meeting. Of course, if one is rarely interested or contributing maybe it's time for a job change.
Different languages have their strengths and weaknesses. I've coded professionally in assembly, Plus, Pl/1, C, C++, C#, Perl, Python, Basic, Visual Basic, Java, Javascript, Bash, TCL, TK, and probably a few more I've long forgotten. Right now Java is a great fit for the problem domain I'm working in. Fortunately I can express myself well in it and the Java developer tools and ecosystem are great.
When C is the appropriate tool I don't hesitate to use it. But I don't hesitate to use my chainsaw when I'm cutting up trees either. You just have to know what you are doing before you start the engine.
Almost all older adults will tell younger adults they have to get a college degree, even if they have to borrow money, and government programs help them do it. It must be OK right? It must be good advice, right? If some "financial advisor" gave the elderly such good investment advice as we give younger adults regarding housing and college, that "financial advisor" would be in jail.
I tell young people to get the best education they can get for the lowest price possible. Also consider the job prospects and income potential the education will provide.
"I don't know what your point is. My point is the study makes no distinction between full time workers and part time workers. It's dishonest."
My point is that it doesn't really matter because it's a massive difference either way. You pretty much admit as much in your next sentence.
"Of course even if you took just full time workers into account the CEO makes a lot more than the typical worker. So what? The CEO is running a company with 375,000 employees and franchises in 100 countries.
No one is complaining about "a lot more". $500k a year would be a lot more. $1 million a year is a lot more. $21.7m is massively more, especially in such a low paying industry.
"A typical employee might be making burgers and taking out the trash. It's just a pointless comparison."
Another way to look at it is that a typical employee might be trying to feed themselves and a family on those wages. Guess how well those kids are likely to turn out? Not only would the family very likely to be a social burden costing us all money at that wage level (even single people would) but the children would be much more likely to turn out as such as well with parents who would have no time for parenting while they work multiple jobs. Then there's the fact that at those wage levels the federal government is effectively subsidizing McDonald's because of this. I think there are a lot of points to be made on the subject of this comparison.
"Would anyone bother to compare the average NFL player salary against the average concession stand vendor? Or rock stars against the roadies? It's just meaningless."
People aren't making those comparisons because they are much smaller employers than fast food, not because there aren't massive differentiation's there as well.
My point about the dishonesty of the study was clear. Their is enough honest data to support their position. Fudging the numbers is dishonest.
Yes, there is a big difference between the compensation you get taking out the trash and the compensation you make running a huge multinational corporation. I don't understand why this should in any way be surprising. My Doctor next door neighbor makes a lot more than me and works shorter hours. I'm sure he makes many multiples more than his support staff too. So what? He gets paid the big bucks for a reason, and they have jobs because he has a successful practice. If they need a second job to meet their own financial goals that's their issue.
I don't waste 5 seconds on worrying about what the CEO of my current employer makes. I worry instead about the decisions he makes and the direction of the company. 50,000 direct jobs are directly affected by his decisions. One job (mine) is affected by my decisions.
If you stuffed $50k under your mattress about 5 years ago, it is now worth $46,347.31 in terms of purchasing power 5 years ago; by "saving", the government has stolen $3652.69 in just 5 years.
Inflation risk is just another risk to be considered
How the fuck are you supposed to do that with interest rates effectively at 0%? It IS the governments fault, forcing people into the market. When all you want to do is save but you are forced into riskier investments due to lack of return, 'xCoin' can start looking reasonable to some.
Saving and investing aren't the same thing.
Nobody is forced to invest. Investing involves putting capital at risk. Low risk generally means no or low return, but your capital is probably safe. High risk could have high return or you could lose it all.
These people perceived cryptocoins as a low risk investment with a very high return. Obviously they were very wrong.
There is nothing uncommon about volume purchasers paying less per unit. Nobody runs around claiming this practice raises the cost for everyone else under some circumstances it can even reduce costs because the producer is making a large profit on the high volume.
Statements like "AEP exempted it from surcharges other Ohioans must pay" are very vague. They don't describe what the surcharges are for. Some localities attach public transit and other public service fund surcharges to energy bills. A super high volume consumer would be paying an inordinate percentage of the total.
Lastly, these large tech companies are investing heavily in renewable energy. Last I heard Amazon was at 50% renewable with multiple large projects under development.
"Last year, McDonald’s boss Steve Easterbrook earned $21.7m while the McDonald’s workers earned a median wage of just $7,017 – a CEO to worker pay ratio of 3,101 to one."
$7,017 is less than half the federal minimum wage. Clearly this "study" includes part time workers.
OK, so say the pay ratio is more like 1000 to 1. Does that really make any difference to the argument? It's still hugely disproportionate compared to 50 years ago.
I agree there is still a big ratio. My point is the study is dishonestly inflating it.
As for justifying it, how much would you expect to get paid to run McDonalds? Can you really compare being a CEO to making french fries? It makes no sense.
So? Unless a lot of their employees work only one day a week 7 grand a year is a paltry sum.
To put it in perspective, 7k a year comes out to $134 a week. If some one is working 3-4 days a week ( I don't know how reliable this is but this site lists average part time hours at 20-30, https://marketrealist.com/2013... ) that is not very much at all. Wages like that one would have to work multiple jobs 7 days a week just to get above poverty level wages.
I don't know what your point is. My point is the study makes no distinction between full time workers and part time workers. It's dishonest.
Of course even if you took just full time workers into account the CEO makes a lot more than the typical worker. So what? The CEO is running a company with 375,000 employees and franchises in 100 countries. A typical employee might be making burgers and taking out the trash. It's just a pointless comparison.
Would anyone bother to compare the average NFL player salary against the average concession stand vendor? Or rock stars against the roadies? It's just meaningless.
"Last year, McDonald’s boss Steve Easterbrook earned $21.7m while the McDonald’s workers earned a median wage of just $7,017 – a CEO to worker pay ratio of 3,101 to one."
$7,017 is less than half the federal minimum wage. Clearly this "study" includes part time workers.
Alright, that is a fair point. The calculation does become more favorable if you take that into account.
Broadly speaking: Using the treasury.gov graphs, the average invested amount between 2008 and 2010 is roughly 300 billion USD, and between 2010 and 2015 about 100 billion USD. That averages to roughly 170 billion invested on average over 7 years. ~15 billion USD profit on that average is still less than 1.3% yearly. If we're generous and ignore the invested money after 2010, it's still only a 2.5% yearly profit. Although the latter is admittedly not all that bad a number, being at least roughly equal to or above normal inflation, I believe my claim still stands.
My math isn't great so I can't calculate the ROI accurately. In April of 2009 there was 238 billion invested. By December there was 80 billion. I just dont see how it makes sense to say "170 billion averaged over 7 years"
I also can't tell from your numbers how much you think the Treasure invested. According to their chart on https://www.treasury.gov/initi... they disbursed 245.1 billion total.
The Goldman investment represented a 1.4 billion return on 10 billion invested, or 14% , in well under two years.
Sure, and some of my portfolio does well, some of it does not. You shouldn't cherrypick like that if you want to make sound financial decisions. The overall numbers won't change and you are intentionally missing the point. Good day.
The overall numbers DO change if you accurately take into account the duration of the investment. As the chart shows, most of the payback + returns happened in 2 years, not 7. Like I wrote earlier, people either don't understand it or intentionally misrepresent it.
Although informative, you haven't touched upon the core of the argument. Even if profitable to some degree, in its entirety (again, when disregarding the massive ensuing issues if no financial backing had been provided) it was by far not as profitable as investing the money elsewhere would have been.
If you only look at the 'Bank' category in your first source, 12.7% profit over a period of ~7 years is still pretty shitty. The '1.4 billion USD on Goldman Sachs alone' is just 0.57% of your own quoted figure of what was invested in banks. In absolutes it sounds like a lot, but relatively speaking, it isn't even the bare minimum any financial investor should be making in a year. A savings account does better than that.
Again, I'm not saying the government should have not provided the financial backing (AKA 'bailouts') and invested their money elsewhere. Let's just not pretend that the endeavor turned out to be some great money maker.
The point is, it's not 7 years. Most of the money was returned with interest in two.
The Goldman investment represented a 1.4 billion return on 10 billion invested, or 14% , in well under two years. The 10 year treasury rate was under 3% back then, so bank accounts were probably.25%. If fact, one of the reasons mortgage backed securities were so in demand was because they paid a fixed rate around 8.5% and were thought to be safe.
Personally I wasn't in favor of TARP or CIP. I preferred to let the healthier banks devour the weak ones. But the deals Hank Paulson structured were unusually good for the taxpayer. The dividend-paying perpetual preferred shares gave the taxpayers a high fixed return, a fixed stock price, and first place in line in the event the bank went under. The warrants gave the taxpayer a big payback when the stock price went up. I'm not aware of any better deal before or since.
I can't say I have looked into the specifics, but 3.5% profit over a period of ~7 years (as per the numbers in the CNN-article) isn't great. If you take inflation into account, it's even a net loss.
Getting a much, much better (direct) ROI on that money (just repaying debt would do the trick) would be easy. Don't get me wrong, though: I'm not saying the bailouts weren't necessary, but they definitely weren't great investments regardless of the financial crisis. They were great investments only because of it.
Thanks for the article. Unfortunately it's a gross oversimplification.
The comment I was replying to was about bank bailouts. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is poorly understood, or just intentionally misrepresented. TARP was a plan for the government to buy from the banks the "troubled assets" (mortgage backed securities) that were killing their balance sheets due to mark-to-market reporting rules. But it never happened, for a couple of reasons. (1) it was impossible to price the assets and come up with a fair price to pay for them, and (2) Warren Buffet invested $5 billion into Goldman Sachs in exchange for perpetual preferred fixed dividend stocks and stock warrants. Britain had a similar approach.
The Treasury followed Buffet's lead and morphed TARP into the "Capital Injection Program" (CIP). All the bank deals were structured to make a profit, very similarly to Buffet's, except the dividend paid would grow over time as an incentive to pay back early. A total of $245 billion was invested in banks, of which most was paid back with interest in under two years. The Treasury made $1.4 billion in a year on Goldman Sachs alone. Besides the sliding dividend scale the banks were in a rush to pay it back because Congress started adding new conditions after the fact. Never do business with the mob or the government.
Other TARP funds were hijacked for other purposes, such as propping up GM, Those deals were not structured to make a profit, and they have lost money.
See this for a good explanation of the program, how banks were forced to be part of it, and how the terms changed after the fact http://archive.fortune.com/200...
I know this isn't a popular opinion around here, but man, there is something deeply wrong with this much effort being extended for what at the end of the day amounts to little more than a vehicle for money laundering. Folks do know that if crypto ever gets big enough for the big boys to take notice (re: Goldman Sachs) they'll have it under their thumb in no time, right? We're talking about a market that a few guys in China were able to manipulate.
Please take the time to research cryptocurrency. You completely missed how and why it was started and being used. It was designed so NO ONE can control it, own it, track it. So big banks and government can't charge fees or taxes on the money. Yes there are some bad actors that are using it for laundering but that comes with all currencies.
This is just wrong.
Governments don't tax the currency, they tax transactions and the gains made in currency trading. No matter what currency you buy a car with you still have to pay the sales tax.
Banks can charge fees on anything.
Goldman is already involved in cryptocurrency trading and has launched its own cryptocurrency. On both of those they will make money on transaction fees and prop trading, For the latter they will not hold a huge position without a hedge, it would exceed their risk tolerance.
Slashdot Mirror
But, it's not that simple... Saying, "don't have kids at a young age" is helpful, sure, but it's only helpful if the person you're telling it to has the education to know what it takes to get pregnant, access to contraceptives, or even the cultural norms to prevent it. Saying "don't drop out of high school" is really great if your kids can afford *not* to drop out of high school. Poor kids may NEED to work for money (to eat) when other kids are going to high school. They may be going to a school where it's physically dangerous to attend. They may not have effective teachers. Maybe they have no way to get to school.
So yes, telling kids these things is all great, but there are a LOT of other factors the influence how and why people make decisions that they do, and more than that, but what happens to people even outside of their decisions. Your children are obviously privileged that they're growing up in a nurturing, supportive environment, where they have the luxury of making good decisions. That's great. But for so many other people, that's not realistic or practical.
My wife came from a housing project in the south Bronx. The people who live there have no end of problems but they still know what they have to do to succeed. Her brother went to Catholic school "because he needed the discipline", she went to public school.
He had his first kid at 19, went to jail for drugs the first time at 21, has been struggling ever since (while having 3 more kids with 3 different women).
She studied and got out.
If you asked him he would tell you flat out how his bad choices messed up his life and the lives of his kids. Don't make excuses for him, it pisses off his kids.
Kid, you have spent too much time reading Ayn Rand. As you get older, if you're smart and open to ideas, you'll learn that it ain't as simple as you describe.
There are a LOT of other factors that go into whether or not a person is successful in the US other than the few you describe.
I won't call you a "fucking LIAR", but I will call you ignorant. Luckily, that IS something you can remedy on your own. Best of luck, snowflake.
How about these this study from the Brookings institute
https://www.brookings.edu/opin...
Or this one, from Britain
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...
It's not a guarantee of success, any more than using condoms guarantees no pregnancies or STD's.
But you wouldn't argue against condom use just because sometimes people who use them still create babies.
Is there really anything in the advice given that you would argue against? I've given my kids more or less the same advice. Their future is an open book filled with promise, as long as they don't do anything fatally stupid like creating a baby, getting a record, dropping out of high school, getting drug addicted, etc. Do you advise your kids otherwise?
So I gave him a call to let him know what messages I was sending it when it crashed. I called him up and said, "Hey, Phil, I just got a child died event..."
*Click*. He hung up the phone.
I called back. No answer.
My co-worker, sitting next to me, told me that I really fucked up. "How so?" "Phil's kid died about 2 months ago. SIDS."
With all sympathy for Phil's tragic loss, this path leads nowhere. Anything you say can remind someone of a painful life event. Are people supposed to stop talking about "children" in any context around Phil? Put curtains up concealing schoolsl? Ban walking kids in strollers? Stop selling baby stuff on Amazon? Pull all the baby food and Pampers from the supermarket?
It's crazy. Phil has to cope without taking it out on the innocent people around him.
Excessive hype is always followed by a trough of disillusionment. But as the TOD fades, plenty of mature, practical applications are likely to emerge. The technological naysayers are usually even more wrong than the hypesters.
Hype cycle
Back in the early PC days, when you had to hook up a cassette player to load your application, and then another one to load your data, we used to tell people they could store recipes on their TRS-80 personal computer. This was not much of a productivity enhancer. I'm sure based on this experience some people would have thought PC's were useless and had no future.
And then floppy disks and spreadsheets were invented.
Distributed teams can't just get together in a physical conference room We have to meet on conference calls.
Tell that to free software projects, that have teams scattered around the globe only coordinated through e-mail.
My son is involved with a global free project. They have group video chats all the time
Regardless I don't think you can compare a voluntary distributed team having loose deliverable schedules with a commercial project. I'm in NY, and I meet daily with my Poland and UK teams. One conference call can be more effective than a week of email.
Health insurance isn't welfare.
Call it what you will, by his own words he is clearly on public assistance which has a work requirement.
This article is about people who are on assistance because they work at Amazon.
From that article: "I applied for the job through the jobcentre. I’ve thought about quitting, but I can’t leave of my own accord. If I did, I’d be sanctioned by the jobcentre and lose my entitlement for benefits and support for six months. I don’t have much choice but to carry on working there. Unless I can find a new job, I’m locked into place."
He's not on welfare because he works at Amazon. He's working at Amazon so he can stay on welfare!
Distributed teams can't just get together in a physical conference room We have to meet on conference calls.
As for who is on the call, we use Skype for business. It shows you who is on the call and who is talking.
If I don't have anything to contribute and am not interested in the discussion I decline the meeting.
Of course, if one is rarely interested or contributing maybe it's time for a job change.
There's nothing new here.
Different languages have their strengths and weaknesses. I've coded professionally in assembly, Plus, Pl/1, C, C++, C#, Perl, Python, Basic, Visual Basic, Java, Javascript, Bash, TCL, TK, and probably a few more I've long forgotten. Right now Java is a great fit for the problem domain I'm working in. Fortunately I can express myself well in it and the Java developer tools and ecosystem are great.
When C is the appropriate tool I don't hesitate to use it. But I don't hesitate to use my chainsaw when I'm cutting up trees either.
You just have to know what you are doing before you start the engine.
Almost all older adults will tell younger adults they have to get a college degree, even if they have to borrow money, and government programs help them do it. It must be OK right? It must be good advice, right?
If some "financial advisor" gave the elderly such good investment advice as we give younger adults regarding housing and college, that "financial advisor" would be in jail.
I tell young people to get the best education they can get for the lowest price possible.
Also consider the job prospects and income potential the education will provide.
"I don't know what your point is. My point is the study makes no distinction between full time workers and part time workers. It's dishonest."
My point is that it doesn't really matter because it's a massive difference either way. You pretty much admit as much in your next sentence.
"Of course even if you took just full time workers into account the CEO makes a lot more than the typical worker. So what? The CEO is running a company with 375,000 employees and franchises in 100 countries.
No one is complaining about "a lot more". $500k a year would be a lot more. $1 million a year is a lot more. $21.7m is massively more, especially in such a low paying industry.
"A typical employee might be making burgers and taking out the trash. It's just a pointless comparison."
Another way to look at it is that a typical employee might be trying to feed themselves and a family on those wages. Guess how well those kids are likely to turn out? Not only would the family very likely to be a social burden costing us all money at that wage level (even single people would) but the children would be much more likely to turn out as such as well with parents who would have no time for parenting while they work multiple jobs. Then there's the fact that at those wage levels the federal government is effectively subsidizing McDonald's because of this. I think there are a lot of points to be made on the subject of this comparison.
"Would anyone bother to compare the average NFL player salary against the average concession stand vendor? Or rock stars against the roadies?
It's just meaningless."
People aren't making those comparisons because they are much smaller employers than fast food, not because there aren't massive differentiation's there as well.
My point about the dishonesty of the study was clear. Their is enough honest data to support their position. Fudging the numbers is dishonest.
Yes, there is a big difference between the compensation you get taking out the trash and the compensation you make running a huge multinational corporation. I don't understand why this should in any way be surprising. My Doctor next door neighbor makes a lot more than me and works shorter hours. I'm sure he makes many multiples more than his support staff too. So what? He gets paid the big bucks for a reason, and they have jobs because he has a successful practice. If they need a second job to meet their own financial goals that's their issue.
I don't waste 5 seconds on worrying about what the CEO of my current employer makes. I worry instead about the decisions he makes and the direction of the company. 50,000 direct jobs are directly affected by his decisions. One job (mine) is affected by my decisions.
If you stuffed $50k under your mattress about 5 years ago, it is now worth $46,347.31 in terms of purchasing power 5 years ago; by "saving", the government has stolen $3652.69 in just 5 years.
Inflation risk is just another risk to be considered
"savings for retirement"
How the fuck are you supposed to do that with interest rates effectively at 0%? It IS the governments fault, forcing people into the market. When all you want to do is save but you are forced into riskier investments due to lack of return, 'xCoin' can start looking reasonable to some.
Saving and investing aren't the same thing.
Nobody is forced to invest. Investing involves putting capital at risk.
Low risk generally means no or low return, but your capital is probably safe.
High risk could have high return or you could lose it all.
These people perceived cryptocoins as a low risk investment with a very high return.
Obviously they were very wrong.
Those two anecdotes are stories of people hoping to magically get rich quick. The outcome is unsurprising.
There is nothing uncommon about volume purchasers paying less per unit. Nobody runs around claiming this practice raises the cost for everyone else under some circumstances it can even reduce costs because the producer is making a large profit on the high volume.
Statements like "AEP exempted it from surcharges other Ohioans must pay" are very vague. They don't describe what the surcharges are for. Some localities attach public transit and other public service fund surcharges to energy bills. A super high volume consumer would be paying an inordinate percentage of the total.
Lastly, these large tech companies are investing heavily in renewable energy. Last I heard Amazon was at 50% renewable with multiple large projects under development.
"Last year, McDonald’s boss Steve Easterbrook earned $21.7m while the McDonald’s workers earned a median wage of just $7,017 – a CEO to worker pay ratio of 3,101 to one."
$7,017 is less than half the federal minimum wage. Clearly this "study" includes part time workers.
OK, so say the pay ratio is more like 1000 to 1. Does that really make any difference to the argument? It's still hugely disproportionate compared to 50 years ago.
I agree there is still a big ratio. My point is the study is dishonestly inflating it.
As for justifying it, how much would you expect to get paid to run McDonalds? Can you really compare being a CEO to making french fries? It makes no sense.
So? Unless a lot of their employees work only one day a week 7 grand a year is a paltry sum.
To put it in perspective, 7k a year comes out to $134 a week. If some one is working 3-4 days a week ( I don't know how reliable this is but this site lists average part time hours at 20-30, https://marketrealist.com/2013... ) that is not very much at all. Wages like that one would have to work multiple jobs 7 days a week just to get above poverty level wages.
I don't know what your point is. My point is the study makes no distinction between full time workers and part time workers. It's dishonest.
Of course even if you took just full time workers into account the CEO makes a lot more than the typical worker. So what? The CEO is running a company with 375,000 employees and franchises in 100 countries. A typical employee might be making burgers and taking out the trash. It's just a pointless comparison.
Would anyone bother to compare the average NFL player salary against the average concession stand vendor? Or rock stars against the roadies?
It's just meaningless.
Generic of course.
I'm just curious, why are Epi Pens not already generic?
Then observe the value of competition... The market works, if you let it.
Drugs become "generic". EpiPens are a patented, approved, and proven simple and reliable drug delivery system.
"Last year, McDonald’s boss Steve Easterbrook earned $21.7m while the McDonald’s workers earned a median wage of just $7,017 – a CEO to worker pay ratio of 3,101 to one."
$7,017 is less than half the federal minimum wage. Clearly this "study" includes part time workers.
Alright, that is a fair point. The calculation does become more favorable if you take that into account.
Broadly speaking:
Using the treasury.gov graphs, the average invested amount between 2008 and 2010 is roughly 300 billion USD, and between 2010 and 2015 about 100 billion USD. That averages to roughly 170 billion invested on average over 7 years. ~15 billion USD profit on that average is still less than 1.3% yearly. If we're generous and ignore the invested money after 2010, it's still only a 2.5% yearly profit.
Although the latter is admittedly not all that bad a number, being at least roughly equal to or above normal inflation, I believe my claim still stands.
My math isn't great so I can't calculate the ROI accurately. In April of 2009 there was 238 billion invested. By December there was 80 billion. I just dont see how it makes sense to say "170 billion averaged over 7 years"
I also can't tell from your numbers how much you think the Treasure invested.
According to their chart on https://www.treasury.gov/initi... they disbursed 245.1 billion total.
but it wasn't about that. Google contacted me and I told them that I wasn't seeing a cultural fit.
I didn't tell them that, but concerns about the environment was among the reasons I declined.
The Goldman investment represented a 1.4 billion return on 10 billion invested, or 14% , in well under two years.
Sure, and some of my portfolio does well, some of it does not. You shouldn't cherrypick like that if you want to make sound financial decisions.
The overall numbers won't change and you are intentionally missing the point. Good day.
The overall numbers DO change if you accurately take into account the duration of the investment. As the chart shows, most of the payback + returns happened in 2 years, not 7. Like I wrote earlier, people either don't understand it or intentionally misrepresent it.
Although informative, you haven't touched upon the core of the argument. Even if profitable to some degree, in its entirety (again, when disregarding the massive ensuing issues if no financial backing had been provided) it was by far not as profitable as investing the money elsewhere would have been.
If you only look at the 'Bank' category in your first source, 12.7% profit over a period of ~7 years is still pretty shitty.
The '1.4 billion USD on Goldman Sachs alone' is just 0.57% of your own quoted figure of what was invested in banks. In absolutes it sounds like a lot, but relatively speaking, it isn't even the bare minimum any financial investor should be making in a year. A savings account does better than that.
Again, I'm not saying the government should have not provided the financial backing (AKA 'bailouts') and invested their money elsewhere. Let's just not pretend that the endeavor turned out to be some great money maker.
The point is, it's not 7 years. Most of the money was returned with interest in two.
The Goldman investment represented a 1.4 billion return on 10 billion invested, or 14% , in well under two years. The 10 year treasury rate was under 3% back then, so bank accounts were probably .25%. If fact, one of the reasons mortgage backed securities were so in demand was because they paid a fixed rate around 8.5% and were thought to be safe.
Personally I wasn't in favor of TARP or CIP. I preferred to let the healthier banks devour the weak ones. But the deals Hank Paulson structured were unusually good for the taxpayer. The dividend-paying perpetual preferred shares gave the taxpayers a high fixed return, a fixed stock price, and first place in line in the event the bank went under. The warrants gave the taxpayer a big payback when the stock price went up. I'm not aware of any better deal before or since.
I can't say I have looked into the specifics, but 3.5% profit over a period of ~7 years (as per the numbers in the CNN-article) isn't great. If you take inflation into account, it's even a net loss.
Getting a much, much better (direct) ROI on that money (just repaying debt would do the trick) would be easy. Don't get me wrong, though: I'm not saying the bailouts weren't necessary, but they definitely weren't great investments regardless of the financial crisis. They were great investments only because of it.
See also here: https://www.nationalreview.com...
(not my favorite source of news, but it's about the points made)
Thanks for the article. Unfortunately it's a gross oversimplification.
The comment I was replying to was about bank bailouts. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is poorly understood, or just intentionally misrepresented. TARP was a plan for the government to buy from the banks the "troubled assets" (mortgage backed securities) that were killing their balance sheets due to mark-to-market reporting rules. But it never happened, for a couple of reasons. (1) it was impossible to price the assets and come up with a fair price to pay for them, and (2) Warren Buffet invested $5 billion into Goldman Sachs in exchange for perpetual preferred fixed dividend stocks and stock warrants. Britain had a similar approach.
The Treasury followed Buffet's lead and morphed TARP into the "Capital Injection Program" (CIP). All the bank deals were structured to make a profit, very similarly to Buffet's, except the dividend paid would grow over time as an incentive to pay back early. A total of $245 billion was invested in banks, of which most was paid back with interest in under two years. The Treasury made $1.4 billion in a year on Goldman Sachs alone. Besides the sliding dividend scale the banks were in a rush to pay it back because Congress started adding new conditions after the fact. Never do business with the mob or the government.
Other TARP funds were hijacked for other purposes, such as propping up GM, Those deals were not structured to make a profit, and they have lost money.
See this for a breakdown of disbursements and repayments:
https://www.treasury.gov/initi...
See this for a good explanation of the program, how banks were forced to be part of it, and how the terms changed after the fact
http://archive.fortune.com/200...
I know this isn't a popular opinion around here, but man, there is something deeply wrong with this much effort being extended for what at the end of the day amounts to little more than a vehicle for money laundering. Folks do know that if crypto ever gets big enough for the big boys to take notice (re: Goldman Sachs) they'll have it under their thumb in no time, right? We're talking about a market that a few guys in China were able to manipulate.
Please take the time to research cryptocurrency. You completely missed how and why it was started and being used. It was designed so NO ONE can control it, own it, track it. So big banks and government can't charge fees or taxes on the money. Yes there are some bad actors that are using it for laundering but that comes with all currencies.
This is just wrong.
Governments don't tax the currency, they tax transactions and the gains made in currency trading. No matter what currency you buy a car with you still have to pay the sales tax.
Banks can charge fees on anything.
Goldman is already involved in cryptocurrency trading and has launched its own cryptocurrency. On both of those they will make money on transaction fees and prop trading, For the latter they will not hold a huge position without a hedge, it would exceed their risk tolerance.