Finance & Stock Groups

Navigation: Main Page » Forum

Finance & Stock Groups Forum Index » Stock Investments » Michael Lewis....drops a bombshell

Page 1 of 1

Author

Message

Stray Dog

Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 7:31 pm

Guest

If you want to figure out how the world works, then the two best places to
learn from are: i) Scott Adams' "Dilbert" cartoon, and ii) almost anything
written by Michael Lewis (he has written several books, and became famous
after his book "Liar's Poker").

This post is about a Michael Lewis article I just read (Conde Nast
Portfolio, Dec 8, 2008, text starting on page 116). There have been a few
excellent articles in CNP in the last few months, although most are the
usual blather.

Title: "The End [of Wall Street]"

I am not making any of this up, it is sellected quotes and if you want
more, you have to get the rest of it yourself.

Phil Scott, if you are reading this, I think it will crack you up.

"To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me
hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups
remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or
particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and
which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate
capital--to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I
tell you that I hadn't the first clue."

"I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even
had savings of my own to manange. I stumbled into a job at Salomon
Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later."

"In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall
Street. the outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the
never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis
following the collapse of [LTCM]: Over and over again, the big Wall Street
investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they kept
on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to
26-year-olds to perform the tasks of no obvious social utility. The
rebelion by American youth against the money culture never happened."

"It's never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock
market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31 [2007], Meredith
Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash. By the end of the
trading day, a woman whom basically no one had ever heard of had shaved
$369 billion off the value of financial firms in the market."

"This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was
saying they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital
apparently didn't even know how to manage their own."

Lewis goes on to talk about Steve Eisman, a kind of "hero" to the story.

"He [Eisman] was promptly appointed the lead analyst for Ames Financial.
'What I didn't tell him was that my job had been to proofread the
documents and that I hadn't understood a word of the fucking things.'"

"Eisman says in his defense, 'I did subprime first. I lived with the worst
first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience
was that Wall Street didn't give a shit waht it sold.'"

"One of his [Eisman's] first jobs, as a junior accountant at Arthur
Andersen, was to audit Salomon Brother's books. 'It was shocking,' he
says. 'No one could explain to me what they were doing.'"

the article has, on page 119, a full page "graphic" of "stars" in the
financial world, about 20, who is going up to get wings and halos, who is
going down in flames. You all would recognize the names and faces if you
were reading the papers.

Eisman said "What most people don't realize is that the fixed-income world
dwarfs the equity world,"..."The equity world is like a fucking zit
compared with the bond market."

"Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated
wast the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American
capitalism."

"I didn't understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold," he
says.

"Eisman still didn't fully understand how the apparatus worked. But, he
knew Wall Street had build A DOOMSDAY MACHINE."

"These bonds could then be sold to investors--pension funds, insurance
companies--who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities. 'I
cannot fucking believe this is allowed--I must have said that a thousand
times in the past two years,' Eisman says."

Here is the biggie (page 156):

"That's when Eisman finally got it. here he'd been making these side bets
[CDOs] with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB
tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make
the bets. Now he saw. There were'nt enough Americans with shitty credit
taking out loans to satisfy investors' appetite for the end product. The
firms used Eisman's bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the
difference between fantasy finance and fantaxy football: When a fantasy
player draftss Peyton manning, he doesn't create a second Peyton Manning
to inflate theleagues stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap,
he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect
but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual
homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side
bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in
effect, was paying Goldman Sachs the interest on a subprime mortgage. In
fact, there was no mortgage at all. 'They weren't satisfied getting lots
of unqualified buyers to borrwo money to buy a house they could not
afford,' Eisman says. 'They were creating them out of whole cloth. One
hundred times over! That's why the losses are so much greater than the
loans. Bbuth that's when I realized they needed us to keep the machine
running. I was like "This is allowed?"'"

"Oh, my God, this is like owning a gold mine."

The article ended with Lewis discussing some interactions with Lewis'
former boss (when he, Lewis, was at Saloman brothers), John Gutfreund,
generally known, at least by some people, as "the King of Wall Street"
and at the lunch table Gutfreund said to Lewis:

"Your...fucking...book" [Liar's Poker]

and

"Your fucking book destroyed my career [he was forced to resign], and
it made yours."

So, now y'all know a little bit more about how "the crooks" operate. For
the benefit of the few, at the expense of the many. And, realize how these
guys are majorly responsible for the mess the world economy is in right
now.

ausound

Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 2:41 am

Guest

Stray Dog <sdog2008@sdf.lonestar.org> wrote in
news:Pine.NEB.4.64.0811251430490.11954@sdf.lonestar.org:

Quote:

a credit-default swap,
he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical
in every
respect but one to the original. The only difference was
that there
was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets
backing the bonds
were the side bets .... paying Goldman Sachs the interest
on a
subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all.

So, now y'all know a little bit more about how "the
crooks" operate.
For the benefit of the few, at the expense of the many.
And, realize
how these guys are majorly responsible for the mess the
world economy
is in right now.

so as smart investors we should watch for the next

manufactured bubble
and latch on to they/them?

nothing new there

Ephraim

Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 4:05 am

Guest

On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:31:16 +0000, Stray Dog
<sdog2008@sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:

Quote:

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom

Excellent heads-up, Stray Dog. Thanks.

I was wondering when someone was going to relate "Liar's Poker" to all
this.
--
Regards,
Ephraim

Stray Dog

Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 6:23 am

Guest

On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, Ephraim wrote:

Quote:

Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:05:35 -0500
From: Ephraim <Charly@mta.invalid
Newsgroups: misc.invest.stocks
Subject: Re: Michael Lewis....drops a bombshell

On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:31:16 +0000, Stray Dog
sdog2008@sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:

If you want to figure out how the world works, then the two best places to
learn from are: i) Scott Adams' "Dilbert" cartoon, and ii) almost anything
written by Michael Lewis (he has written several books, and became famous
after his book "Liar's Poker").

This post is about a Michael Lewis article I just read (Conde Nast
Portfolio, Dec 8, 2008, text starting on page 116). There have been a few
excellent articles in CNP in the last few months, although most are the
usual blather.

Title: "The End [of Wall Street]"

I am not making any of this up, it is sellected quotes and if you want
more, you have to get the rest of it yourself.

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom

Excellent heads-up, Stray Dog. Thanks.

You're welcome.

Quote:

I was wondering when someone was going to relate "Liar's Poker" to all
this.

As much as I have no problem with business, _per se_, and we do need
factories and services, I am affraid that the foxes are in the chickencoop
(otherwise known as the CEO-crooks, plus a sundry bunch of other
sub-crooks that also help the main crooks feed off anything, anywhere,
anytime, anyhow)

You may want to have a look at my "CEO-as-crook" FAQ, appended below, for
an attempt at a more balanced picture of what we're up against.

Quote:

--
Regards,
Ephraim

FAQ #1: Are all CEOs (and their hangers-on) just a bunch of crooks?

The following represent a reference list of various "quotes and sources"
of information about executive and management mindsets and how the
priority is placed on benefits to the executives & managers rather than
the company customers and any socially redeeming relationship to the local
community (however that may be defined).

FAQ #2: Isn't that question (above) a bit bigoted?
Yeah, and I have a similar bigoted attitude towards criminals--they should
all be in jail.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

From the WSJ, Dec 27, 2006, Front page continueing onto page A6

title:"Executives' Pay: How Stock-Option Grants Became Part of the Problem"

Here is the list, and the booty (as described in the table caption as the
sum of "Realized gains from options" and "value of in-the-money options" and
given here as the "total", and over the period "1992-2005" and the source
was given as "Standard & Poor's ExecuComp").

William McGuire UHG 2,121 mil
Lawrence Ellison Oracle 1,524 mil
Sanford Weill Citigroup 979
Michael Eisner Disney 919
Stephen Hemsley UHG 853
Richard Fairbank Capital One 781
Barry Diller IAC 697
Eugene Isenberg Nabors Ind. 685
Michael Dell Dell 675
Terry Semel Yahoo 665
John Chambers Cisco Sys 572
Irwin Jacobs Qualcomm 569
Arthur Levinson Genentech 520
Omid Kordestani Google 513
Dwight Schar NVR 511
Howard Solomon Forest Labs 506
Henry Silverman Avis Budget Gp 488
William Greehey Valero 464
Howard Schultz Starbucks 439
Angelo Mozilo Countrywide Fin. 434
George David United Tech. 419
Edwin Crawford Caremark Rx 405
Richard Fuld, Jr. Lehman Bros. 388
Kevin Rollins Dell 368
Anthony Petrello Nabors Ind. 362

that's the top 25. Extend the list down to the double digets and its a lot
of full wheelbarrows headed to the bank.

Oh, yes, footnote 2 says two of the above have agreed to give back some of
the money. What was on page 6 was the rest of the article and nothing else.
No advertising, no other articles. Lots of details. These guys must spend
half their time figuring out how to abscond with as much, or more, as
possible. The other half the time, they ride herd on the VPs and other
underlings who do all the work.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2006, page A10:

title: "Outside Directors Are Cited in Study Over Backdating"
by Steve Stecklow

quotes:

"A new academic study suggests that many outside directors received
manipulated stock-option grants, a finding that may help explain why the
practice of options backdating wasn't stopped by the boards of some
companies."

"The statistical study, which names no individuals or firms, estimates that
1,400 outside directors at 460 companies received questionable option
grants, suggesting the widespread practice extended well beyond the
executive suite."

"The study is notable because it suggests that outside, or independent,
directors--who are supposed to play a special role safeguarding against cozy
board relationships with management--may have been co-opted in options
backdating by receiving manipulated grants themselves."

"More than 130 companies are under investigation by U.S. authorities for
backdating or otherwise manipulating stock-option grants, the biggest
corporate-fraud probe in decades. To date more than 60 executives and
directors have lost their jobs."

More details in the article.

= = = = = = = = == = = = = =
WSJ, December 12, 2006, front page (rightmost column)

title:"How Backdating Helped Executives Cut Their Taxes"
subtitle: Evidence Suggests Recipients Of Some Stock-Option Grants
Manipulated Exercise Dates
by: Mark Maremont and Charles Forelle

quote from first two paragraphs:

"New evidence suggests that corporate executives may have found another way
to manipulate their stock options, this time to cheat on their income
taxes."

"In a paper that began circulating in recent days, a Securities and Exchange
Commission economist concludes there is strong statistical evidence that
executives manipulated the exercise dates of their options as part of a tax
dodge. And a review of corporate filings turns up some companies with
startling options-exercise patterns."

The article goes into substantial detail and is complicated.

=============

WSJ, Nov 17, 2006, page A2:
"Backdated Options Pad CEO Pay By Average of 10%"
by John Hechinger

Quotes:

About 850 U.S. chief executives received backdated or otherwise manipulated
stock option grants that boosted their annual pay, on average, by at least
10%, according to a new study.

The study, released yesterday by professors at Harvard and Cornell
universities and the French business school Insead, bolsters the view of
federal prosecutors who have viewed stock-option backdating as means to
steal money from shareholders. Defenders of the companies who engaged in the
practice have said that backdating often involved minor sums and was merely
an alternative way of providing market-based pay.

The researchers also found that executives who reaped riches from backdating
options started out with reported compensation that was richer than their
peers at similar companies. On top of that above-average pay, executives
received an average of an extra $1.3 million to $1.7 million through each
manipulated grant, the academics found.

More than 130 companies are under federal investigation in the stock option
timing scandal, which has claimed the jobs of more than 50 executives and
directors. Five former executives face criminal charges.

Researchers examined the timing of stock option grants from 1996 through
2006, sifting through 19,036 grants made by about 6,000 companies led by a
total of 8,800 chief executives.

The professors found that 2,329, or 12%, were granted at monthly low
prices....

In all, 12% of all U.S. public firms, or 720, awarded one of more
manipulated grants....

The study also found that companies with long-serving CEOs and lacking a
majority of independent directors were more likely to make lucky grants.
=========
WSJ, Weds, Aug 16, 2006, page A11

title: "How Backdating Is Like a 1980s 'Rockumentary'
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

While the main thrust of the article is to diminish the significance of
the expansion of the present options backdating scandal (mainly involving
CEOs and other executives in cushy, opulent, overpaid, overprotected,
and overpampered positions), the following quote gives additional evidence
that executives consider themselves a priviledged group deserving of
self-distributed benefits in any manner they can think of.

"Some 100 companies are under investigation, and Iowa economist Erik Lie
says his data show that 2,200 firms 'engaged in backdating or similar
manipulation of grants to top executives at some point between 1996 and
2005'"

==================

WSJ, Sat/Sun issue, July 15-16, 2006, front page (extending to p A4):

title: "Executive Pay: the 9/11 Factor"
sidebar: "In the wake of 9/11, about 90 big companies that didn't usually
grant stock options in September did so as their falling stocks made
options potentially more valuable for executives."
by Charles Forelle, James Bandler and Mark Maremont

Quote:

"On Sept 21, 2001, rescuers dug through the smoldering remains of the
World Trade Center. Across the town, families buried two firefighters
found a week earlier. At Fort Drum, on the edge of New York's Adirondacks,
soldiers readied for deployment halfway around the world."

"Boards of directors of scores of American companies were also busy that
day. They handed out millions of bargain-priced stock options to their top
executives."

WSJ research on S&P data on 1800 leading companies showed that 511 top
executives at 186 of these companies got stock option grants between Sept
17 and the end of the month of 2001.

Another quote:

"Did companies take unseemly advantage of a national tragedy?"

A full two thirds of page A4 is devoted to data, questions, and comments
from a number of companies that responded to questions, and companies that
did not respond to attempts to get comments.

==================
From WSJ, Friday, June 23, 2006, front page:
title:"As Workers Pensions Wither, Those for Executives Flourish"
by Ellen E. Schultz and Theo Francis

quotes: "To help explain its deep slump, [GM] often cites 'legacy costs.'
including pensions for its giant U.S. work force. In its latest annual
report, GM wrote: 'Our extensive pension and [post-employment] obligations
to retirees are a competitive disadvantage for us.' Early this year, GM
announced it was ending pensions for 42,000 workers."

"But there's a twist to the automaker's pension situation: The pension
plans for its rank and file US workers are overstuffed with cash,
containing about $9 billion more than is needed to meet their obligations
for years to come."

"Another of GM's pension programs, however, saddles the company with a
liability of $1.4 billion. These pensions are for its executives."

"This is the pension squeeze companies aren't talking about: Even as many
reduce, freeze or eliminate pensions for workers--complaining of the
costs--their executives are building up ever-bigger pensions, causing the
companies' financial obligations for them to balloon."

"These liabilities are largely hiden, because corporations don't
distinguish them from overall pension obligations in their federal
financial filings."

The article goes on in great detail about the ultra-cushy deals executives
get at some of our largest corporations.

===================
From WSJ, Friday, May 26, 2006, Front page:
(under headlines of Lay, Skilling convicted of fraud)
"Guilty Verdicts Provide 'Red Meat' to Prosecutors Chasing Comapanies"
by Paul Davies and Kara Scannell

Sidebar shows this:

Criminal convictions and plea deals (footnote 1)

CEOs................82
Corp Presidents.... 85
Corp VPs...........102
CFOs............... 36
COOs............. 14

Criminal and civil penalties (footnote 2)

Restitution........ 2.2 bil
Recoveries....... 34 mil
Fines ........... 79.1 mil
Seizures ....... 27.9 mil

footnotes:
1. Through Mar, 2006
2. Through Mar, 2005

Source: Justice Dept.

Mentioned in the article as next tartgets: about two dozen cases of
options backdating.

========================
From the WSJ, Tuesday, May 3, 2005, page A16, bottom right corner:

title: "Vladimir Ilyich Jobs?" (about Steve Jobs)
by Rich Karlgaard

some quotes:

"But there is, always has been, a dark side to his genius. Once again we
see it. Angered out of scale by an unauthorized biography called 'iCon
Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business,' Mr. Jobs
went nuclear last week. He banished iCon from Apple stores. You might say,
fine, that is his prerogative. But is it wise? Apple's shareholders, not
its CEO, own the stores [my note: no they don't]. The harmless potboiler
would've driven buyers to Apple stores. Mr. Jobs, alas, didn't stop with
iCon. He also yanked from 'his' stores all books from iCon's publisher,
John Wiley & Sons. These include dozens of popular nerd books, such as
'Macs for Dummies,' written to help Apple's customers. The dummy here is
Mr. Jobs."

"Mr. Job's war on iCon follows another stupid public relations move born
of, well, totalitarian impulse. In January, Apple sued three bloggers for
publishing leaked information on Apple products. One is a young college
student who began writing Mac devotionals at age 13."

"For all this, America loves Steve Jobs. Me, too, though I shouldn't.
Years ago, he phoned me on a Saturday morning and tried to squash a story
my then magazine, Upside, was about to print on NeXT, Inc. NeXT was his
second startup after apple. But it was failing and our story said so. One
the phone Mr. Jobs cooed and threatened, including warnings to 'watch my
backside' and, strangely, 'don't ride a bicycle alone on dark roads.' We
ran the story. Michael Moritz, before he was a venture capitalist funding
Yahoo adn Google, once covered Apple as a Time magazine reporter. Mr. Jobs
repeatedly tried to get him fired."

The next covers the author's love affair with the Mac and how he started
magazines and got into business using Macs and just gushes over the Mac.

Back to the quotes.

"But, like many revolutionaries, Mr. Jobs appears to be one who loves the
world and loathes people. He has been known to bring misery to people's
lives, and not just book authors. His capacity for cruelty runs the gamut
from verbal lashings of his own customers to rumored summary dismissals
for the sin of having brought him the wrong brand of bottled water. He
denied the paternity of a daughter for years. In a book called 'Infinite
Loop,' writer Michael S. Malone describes how, in the early 1970s, Mr.
Jobs even screwed over his eventual Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak."

The next paragraph goes into the deal where Jobs and Woz were to share the
work and pay for programming a game for Atari, but in the end, Atari gave
jobs $7,000 and Woz got $350 but Woz "...did all the work." and "Mr. Jobs
took all [the] credit for writing the game...."

And, they give these guys big jobs [no pun], big pay, big egos, and let
other people do the work.

========================
Subject: More proof: CEOs just a bunch of crooks....

From CFO magazine (maybe more on www.cfo.com), April 2005, pages 65 and
68.

Page 68 is a whole table of data on SEC investigations of companies for
fraud. Across the top are labels of columns (date, company, citation [see
below], penalty in dollars, cease and desist orders, and comments).
A total of 23 named companies were covered, mostly with names that most
people would recognize. 7 of the 23 did NOT cooperate with the SEC and 4
more gave only qualified cooperation (7+4 is about half). The results of
the investigations led to four permanent injunctions, four more companies
received ("permanently enjoined") sanctions, eight more received "cease
and desist" orders. Only seven received no order or sanction. Only 5 of
the 23 received a zero penalty (in dollars), the rest had to pay from
$400,000 up to $125 mil (many in the double didget mil fine range).

On page 65 is a sidebar showing SEC filings of financial fraud actions by
year. In the five years including 2000 to 2004, the total number of
actions filed ranged from a low of 484 (in 2001) to a high of 639 (in
2004). Fraud actions were a low of 103 in 2000 and linearly went up to 177
om 2004, so things are definitely getting worse, faster. Fines were much
smaller in 2000 and much larger in 2004.

500 actions per year --if to the same companies (unlikely), then they are
not cleaning up their acts; if to different companies then after about two
decades -- then we're talking about a major fraction of the "pillars" of
the business community.

If I came up to a barrel of apples and had a close look at the top layer
and found that many bad apples...I wouldn't waste my time with sampling
the rest of the barrel.

========================

Quote: "And while all this is supposed to be funny, the reptilian chill
that's felt when Kersten discusses the worker class calls to mind Joel
Bakan and his recent book _The Corporation_ (Free Press, 2004), in which
Bakan points out that corporations, in their single-minded pursuit of
profit, embody the clinical definition of a psychopath." This sentence was
found within the article 'Soul Assassins' by Jamie Malanowski, which
appeared in the May 2005 issue of Fast Company, pages 85-89.

========================
The book "Confessions of a Union Buster" by Martin Jay Levitt

A management consultant specializing, over most of his life, in helping
managers bust existing unions and prevent new ones from forming turns a
new page when realizing that his efforts increased profits at the expense
of marriages, family life, community health, and standard of living of
workers.

===============================

The book "The Big Boys" by Ralph Nader and Robert Taylor

Profiles about a dozen executives of major corporations: implication? They
were assholes, every last one of them.

===============================
From the book "In The Name Of Profit" by Robert L. Heilbroner et al.
(Doubleday & Co, Inc., 1972, 273 pp incl. index). Profiles six executives.

from the forward: "[This book] tries to show what sort of men run
corporations...." and "The goal was to produce the first book that
dramatized, through actual named executives of major American companies,
the sickness at the heart of the system."

Chapters & titles:
1. "Why should my conscience bother me?"
2. Deciding to cheapen the product
3. A colonial heritage
4. "Get away with what you can"
5. "This napalm business"
6. Men of distinction.

==================

From the May 2005 issue of _Fast Company_, page 33, comes a column "The
Ethics Monitor" by Jennifer Alsever. The results of a survey.

Questions Answered "yes"

Do you instruct your assistant
to tell callers that you're
"in a meeting" when you really
just don't want to be bothered? 35%

Have you given a good performance
review to a worker who maybe
didn't deserve it? 24%
(speculation: how many workers
got bad performance reviews that
didn't deserve them?)

When discussing job opportunities
with potential new employees, have
you ever fudged the size of your
current or most recent salary? 27%
(speculation: does this happen
in salary surveys that we all hear
about? how much, %, fudging goes on?)

Do you sometimes "embellish" your
professional experience when
circumstances call for it? 31%

Have you told an employee "no" and
blamed company policy or your boss
when it was really your decision? 25%

(speculation: are these survey
data fairly accurate or did some of
those who answered lie to hide their
misdeeds from the public? i.e. is the
situation worse than it appears?)

Also, the article reported that fewer than one quarter of the respondents
answered no to all questions.
==================================================

Become CEO, become evil personified by virtue of position

People who are more than average aggressive-ambitious people may be
motivated to aim for priviledged stations in life (eg. CEO, or other
robber-barron executives, administrators, managers, etc.) for no other
reason than the power and wealth associated with these positions. It is
easy to understand that the ego boost that comes with such positions can
change one's personality in ways that are not good for anyone.

In addition to many many articles I've read over decades, and summary
files for NG posts that have been posted in the past, come two new
articles from the WSJ, a periodical that surely would not go out of its
way to bash a serious business problem if it were not a serious problem.

First Article:

Title: "Are CEOs worth their weight in gold?" compiled by Lauren
Etter (WSJ, Jan 21-22, Sat/Sun, 2006, page A7), is under "Hot Topics" (a
half page "sidebar" with 1/4 page text, and 1/4 page of vignettes. I'll
just mention a few statements made in the article:

"Oracle CEO Lawrence Ellison holds the record for highest executive
compensation in a single year: $706 million in 2001, says the Institute
for Policy Studies. Sanford I. Weill, former CEO of Citigroup, is the
only CEO to get more than $1 billlion in total compensation over the
past 15 years."

"In 1960, the ratio of the average Fortune 500 CEO's pay to the U.S.
President's salary was 2-to-1. Today it is 30-to-1."

Could he be a rare good guy?-> "John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Markets,
limits his pay to no more than 14 times the pay of his average employee."
Wonder if there aren't some hidden compensation items, though.

"The average CEO's salary in the U.S. [the worst of the robber-barrons] is
475 times greater than the average worker's salary. In Japan, it is 11
times greater; in france, 15 times; in Canada, 20; in South Africa, 21,
and in Britain, 22."

So, they are overpaid. How about that evil? "Public Opinion-percentage of
survery respondents saying they hold a favorable opinion of business
corporations [telephone survey of 1003 adults +/- 3 percentage points]"
and the accompanying graph shows, for 1995: about 70% favorable. Then an
almost linear drop to 2005: 42% favorable. Big drop. Does the public
dislike the greedy-selfish corporate culture more than all those cheap
prices they've been getting?

Second Article:

"Friends Who Become Bosses Often Change in Surprising Ways"
by Jared Sandberg (WSJ, in column "cubicle culture," April 18, 2006, page
B1.

After several paragraphs of how newly promoted bosses change their
personalities and how people around them respond or react comes this:
"It's a classic pattern. 'If you get promoted, you have a lot of anxiety
because you don't want people to know you're a promotion mistake,' says
Linda Hill, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business
School who has written on this subject. The newly promoted have to prove
to people that they know more so they become authoritarian and
controlling, she says, and manage tasks, not people. That results,
according to her research, in 80% of subordinates feeling they are being
bossed around on every detail."

==========================================
Quotes:

"From 1999 to 2003, the five top dogs [yes, that's the term they used] at
each of the 1,500 largest publicly traded firms cumulatively took down
$122 billion in salary, bonus, and stock, compared with $68 billion from
1993 through 1997"

and

"In the period from 2001 to 2003, top-executives compensation amounted to
9.8% of the companies net income, almost double the 5% in 1993 to 1995.
That's money that otherwise would end up in shareholders' pockets."

from page C1, WSJ, Weds, Jan 11, 2006

title "Lavish Pay Puts a Bite on Profits"
by Jesse Eisinger
(name of the column: Long & Short)
======================================

"Five More Companies Show Questionable Options Pattern"
by Charles Forelle and James Bandler
WSJ, Monday, May 22, 2006, front page.

Quotes:

"In 2001, KLA-Tencor Corp.,..., granted its top executives, including
Chairman Ken Levy, two batches of stock options. They arrived on unusually
fortuitous days for the executives: The first dated at the share price's
first-half low; the second at its second-half low."

"In all, Mr. Levy received 10 grants from KLA-Tencor and its predecessor
company between 1994 and 2001--all preceding quick runups in the share
price; an analysis by The Wall Street Journal found that the probability
that that pattern occurred merely by chance is tiny--around one in 20
million."

"Over the past two months, questions about the timing of executive options
have rocked more than a dozen companies, leading to probes by board
committees, securities regulators and federal prosecutors. Ten executives
or directors at these companies have left their posts in recent weeks."

"Now a fresh statistical examination by the Journal has turned up five
additional companies, including KLA-Tencor, with highly improbably patterns
of operations grants, similar to those of some companies already facing
scrutiny from federal authorities."

"The newly identified companies span the U.S. and do everything from
making telescopes to running dialysis clinics."

"The five companies are noteworthy for nearly always awarding top
executives option grants dated just ahead of a sharp rise in the
company's share price. The dates were often at the bottom of
steep dips in the share price. The statistical analysis doesn't
prove wrongdoing. It is possible that the sharp rises after
grants results from luck, a sense of market timing or some other
factor. But the repeated grants before sharp stock gains raise
the question of whether the grants wer actually awarded later,
then backdated to the more favorable time, or otherwise gamed."

The article goes into extensive detail and utilizes the help of
several academics whose specialty is patterns in stock option
events. One professor suggested that "options backdating could be
pandemic." His data indicated that "on average, shares perform
far better than normal in the periods after option dates. The
aberration is so large ...that backdating or some other means of
grant timing 'must be widespread'."

Companies have been subpoenaed. And, several companies caught in
the probe will have to restate years of financials and amounts
into the hundreds of millions of dollars were involved. In other
examples, some executives have resigned, others were fired, and
two directors stepped down. The article continues on page A10.

A related article, on page A11 of the same issue, is an article
"How Journal Found Options Pattern" by Charles Forelle, showing
many stock price curves and many (not all, but a majority) with
option dates coinciding exactly with the deepest dip in stock
prices. Each named the company and the named the executive. Many
of the companies did not return phone calls or emails.

Yeah, the article also explains how it hurts stockholders, too.
=======================================

Mon11-Oct-2004

CORRELATION BETWEEN VALUES AND SALARY PREFERENCES OF BUSINESS
EXECUTIVES

Executives who downplay ethics and values in their decision making may
also be the ones who prefer extraordinarily high salaries for
themselves.

By comparison, those executives who are more inclined to consider
ethics and values in their decisions preferred more fair pay
throughout their organizations.

Diane Swanson, associate professor of management and the von Waaden
business administration professor at Kansas State University, said
this is the most significant implication of her recent research.

In addition, Swanson said executives who are more likely to downplay
values in decisions and prefer extraordinarily high salaries are also
the ones who have received more business education.

"This is yet more evidence of business education teaching greed and
self-centeredness instead of service to community," Swanson said.
"Business students should learn that business people not only serve
themselves but society as well. They've got to have some community
mindedness or we'll be stuck with even more ill-effects of corporate
scandals in the future.

"One reason these findings are important is that, in the midst of
corporate scandals that have racked society and destroyed jobs and
trust in business, executives are still paid astronomical salaries,"
Swanson said. "This should be questioned."

She conducted the research with Marc Orlitzky from the University of
Auckland in New Zealand. Swanson said the results are only preliminary
and more executives must be surveyed to make stronger assertions.

Swanson and Orlitzky's research was funded by the Australian Graduate
School of Management in Sydney, Australia.

Swanson will be speaking at the 2004 Japha Symposium on Business and
Professional Ethics Friday, Oct. 29. Swanson's speech will be
published as a chapter in a book by Blackwell Publisher.

She submitted a paper based on her research because it related to the
theme "The Ethics of Executive Compensation." The symposium is
sponsored by the University of Colorado.

Swanson is also chair and founder of the Business Ethics Education
Initiative, an effort championing the need for ethics in business
school curricula. She holds a doctorate with distinction from the Katz
Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh in
Pennsylvania for business administration in strategy, environment and
organization. She received her master's in economics from the
University of Missouri at Kansas City, with honors, in 1982, and her
bachelor's in business from Avila College in 1980.

=========================

Quote (page 261):

"The Prevalence of Corporate Crime"

"As we saw earlier, Edwin Sutherland's classic study led him to conclude
that many corporations violated the law with enough frequency to be termed
"habitual criminals"(6 Cool

. Although statistics on corporate violations are
not collected on a regular basis, there is a good deal of evidence to
suggest that Sutherland's conclusion is substantially correct.
Journalistic accounts of the extent of corporate crime paint a bleak
picture of morality in the busines world. A 1980 _Fortune_ article, for
example, found the lawlessness of big companies startling, noting that 11
percent of 1,043 corporations studied had committed "at least one
major delinquency (69)." _US News and World Report_ discovered that over
half of the nation's twenty-five largest corporations had recently been
involved in serious misbehavior (criminal or civil), and that between 1971
and 1980 "2,690 corporations of all sizes were convicted of federal
criminal offenses. (70)" And, in 1985, disclosures of organizational
misconduct had become so common that the _New York Times_ observed that "a
corporate crime wave appears to be exploding. (71)"

* * *

"Examining the behavior of 477 largest publicly owned manufacturing
corporations in the United States, the study ranged over a great variety
of illegal behavior, including the failure to supply information to
government agencies, air and water pollution, bribery, tax violations,
unfair trade practices such as price fixing, transgressing labor
laws, and violations of regulations concerning consumer safety.
Approximately 60 percent of the corporations had at least one federal
action brought against them in the two-year period covered by the study
(1975-1976) -- a rate of lawlessness exceeding that found by Sutherland
(who analyzed his sample over a forty-year period)."

Page 266:

"A knowing disregard for consumer health has also been found in the
pharmaceutical industry. Clinard and Yeager's study of corporate crime
over a two year period found that each of the seventeen pharmaceutical
firms in their sample had one offense, and two companies had over twenty
violations (102). Most disquieting, as M. David Ermann points out, drug
companies have a long tradition of fabricating test data and of
concealing hazards that cause birth defects, illness, and death (103)."

Page 269:

"The FBI's 'Greylord Operation' revealed massive corruption in Chicago's
Cook County court system, ending in the indictment of nearly ninety
judges, lawyers, and court officials. An FBI sting in South Carolina --
called 'Operation Lost Trust,' but known locally as 'Bubbagate' --
ensnared ten legislators taking bribes, and a similar operation
in Arizona -- called 'Azcam' -- resulted in convictions or indictments of
seventeen people, including seven state legislators.(127)"

This is all from chapter 8: "Crime in High Places" including in
professions, government, with 5-6 pages of references, all from the book
"Criminology" 2nd Edition, by Gresham M. Sykes (U. Va, affiliation) and
Francis T. Cullen (U. Cincinnati, affiliation), and under the general
editorship of Robert K. Merton (Columbia University), Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1992., 529 pages, incl. index.

=================end of file=======

ausound

Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 6:47 am

Guest

Ephraim <Charly@mta.invalid> wrote in
news:221pi4d07cggbips7bg97i9fhe7fmm870e@4ax.com:

Ephraim
good to see you posting agin
missed your MIS participation

Page 1 of 1 All times are GMT The time now is Wed Jan 07, 2009 9:46 pm Finance & Stock Groups Forum Index