Billionaire Blues

I have long decried the obsession, fascination and defense of the Billion Dollar Boys Club. I believe that it comes from our own misguided belief if not deluded one in that of Meritocracy, the Unicorn that Paul Bunyan carried on his back as he saved the country by simply carrying a big ax that cut through the bullshit. Or whatever.

I watched a Frontline with the subject the Federal Reserve. What was interesting was both the critics and fans of the country’s bank is that many worked within it. The few that did not were long time investors or financial experts who have worked in politics or around those who do. Who wasn’t interviewed was anyone in Congress, in past Administrations or anyone in the Banks that have been the beneficiary of all that capital. To do a comprehensive understanding of the Fed and what it does is to follow the money. And that trail is a big one that will take more than an hour of programming. And that goes with how one becomes and is a billionaire. It is not as if they have bags of cash at hand that enables them to simply reach in grab a 1,000 dollar bill and head to the mall. No, like explaining the Fed, its complicated.

For the first time in my lifetime I saw and experienced how the Fed worked when we all got those stimulus checks, that was when the trickle down economics I had heard of actually happened. With that came PPE loans and other methods that enabled the folks on Main Street to get some of that long herd expression, that the Fed can “print money” at will. But, without Congress and the Trump Administration in those nascent days of Covid, NONE of that would have happened. Sorry folks, yep Trump did something. Well he did nothing, Jerome Powell and oddly Steve Mnuchin were the Architects of the relief program, as flawed as it was it worked. The largest recipients, HOWEVER, and yes that is big HOWEVER, were the wealthy. And with that they cashed their checks, and did little if anything to stimulate the economy in the way the poors did when they cashed theirs. The wealth barometer rose and with that pushing income inequality into new levels. And yet they complain endlessly about inflation and the lack of workers to fill shitty paying jobs.

**my favorite rich bitch story is the dead Peter G. Peterson who like many in Government did his best to destroy it. His obsession was Social Security and yet while railing about debt cashed those Social Security checks, like his bitch goddess the Libertarians love, Ayn Rand. It is like DeJoy in the Postal Office, or any of Trump appointees that hate Government and go work in it to kill it. Gosh that is so Southern, the conundrum of contradictions. Ah I miss Nashville, no, not really. But that was what it was like to live there. Hysteria over government reach while always having their hands out for gummit money.

But wages and income explains why the focus currently is on inflation as to keep it below 5% is a way to keep wages low. If the prices go up and wages stay down, that in turn causes stagflation, which is an dancing balance between the two. Stagflation occurs when high inflation happens during a period of stagnant economic growth and high unemployment. Stagflation presents a challenge to policymakers because the tools used to combat inflation typically raise unemployment and vice versa.

As I sit here right now there is a report on the news that the Covid recession was over last April. Yes, last April, 2020, and it lasted two months, the shortest on historical record. That said that was due to the who/what? The Fed. yes I am a fan girl of Jerome Powell. The unemployment levels are still high and yet again we are not going to see those numbers until October the typical time historically when the Markets get spooky, like Halloween only without candy. And we are still in a flux with regards to services and goods on par with demand. That is again due to the shutdowns of last year that have not fully been restored and once again we are seeing the housing demand decline as with that the goods to build/remodel are back in stock, that said is that same demand there. The used car issue is up as well people don’t want to take public transport and they have to get to work from where they moved to escape Covid and paid too much for a house to do so. Then we have again another teeter totter that I agree with Powell is a market switch. I recall this in early Covid days with regards to food and then shortages as they had to figure out how to pivot distribution and production now the Grocery Stores are overstocked. Supposedly to offset price increases. So hoard that hamburger now with your toilet paper peeps!

So are we heading to dark times? Fuck if I know I am not Miss Cleo!! But it will be telling to see in the months ahead as eviction moratoriums are lifted, the ending of unemployment extension and of course the summer gig jobs fade as they always do, the ones right now that seem to be the focus of all the hysteria. When school goes back and people continue to get Covid thanks to their obstinance on that issue, we will see once again UI numbers tick up. The Markets already on their roller coaster will of course go Mr. Toads’ Wild Ride and then the Government, aka the Fed, will change the tracks. I cannot stress enough that the Fed is my hero as “they” are the ones who stepped up in a crisis and stopped a Depression the likes not seen since the 1930’s. And yes that too gave us the Jazz Age and Gilded Age while millions stood in lines for food. Same diff today. Just not as sad and jazzy.

2008 is the most recent time in history where we can turn all the headlights and spotlights on Banks. They funded without issue millions of loans that were bundled together, the good, the bad and the ugly and sold them around the globe to other investors, who in turn sold them, bet on them and then it turn went FUCK when they actually looked at them and said, “Shit these are worth crap!” And then the flushing began.

I am trying to make this as simplistic as possible and avoid details as when we get caught up in them we lose the sight of the subject and purpose of what this all means an is about. In other words the Rich always get richer and the Government enables it, if not encourages it through policy and programs in the same way the used to with Social Programs that were more diverse and widespread in purpose. Social Security, Public Education, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance and even the Interstate Highway System that allowed us to freely cross country. This also includes the Post Office and to some extent all the ways we get around in public transport as well as Amtrak. As it is all subsidized or even controlled by the Government who in turn funds the States and Cities who in turn fund and manage their own transit systems. We have all been beneficiaries of the Government with our hands happily out and open and with that we use the services and build the cities that enabled the rich to escape from when the Covid shit hit the fan. Now not even happy with their remote homes on Islands and in foreign countries they now are heading to Space. Wow Space Jam takes on a whole new meaning now.

But when you have the audacity or temerity to question their wealth, their mental health and their behavior you are attacked and abused the same way many of the Capital Hill Police were on that January 6th day that will now always live in infamy. See ya Pearl Harbor. The fanboys and some women, think that all of it was hard earned clever work. No it was strong arming in a different way, by obsessively buying or destroying competition. They own their stock in fist loads and share little power, with that they make singular decisions with regards to their own wealth and position and in turn do little for the overall goodness of community. But that occasional check, or promise to the giving pledge seems to calm the masses at the gate, as they believe that they are “doing good” “changing the world” and are making America great again and again and again. And yet when asked specifically what that is and can you provide three solid examples of how that worked in symmetry and benefited a large cohort, nope, not possible so back to the abuse. When all else fails call someone fat or stupid, it is a great comeback… when you are eight years old or seventy, right Donnie?

We are on the verge of a massive crisis when it comes to housing, it is not simply affordable for anyone but the rich or the heavily in debt. So as employers complain about lacking staff and having to raise prices to hire staff and in turn provide incentives, yes those get passed on to the consumers, if we were earning enough it would do what? Balance off. If I am making 1000 dollars and spend 10 bucks on a coke and burger, that is .01 of my earnings. If I make 10000 and spend the same it is .0001. It is called math and that means that the same goes for donations. So when the rich are flashing that cash the takeout for them is not that much in percentage to earnings. But okay folks, math is hard and stuff.

But when it comes to the economy, the reality is Wall Street has nothing to do with it, nothing. They simply push money around and yet we villianize the Fed as the Tea Party did back in 2009. They were right on some level and wrong on another as what they managed to do was stall progress and in turn enable Congress to work together and we see that today, again, and again and again. Some of it is politics but as Neel Kashary said in Frontline, he never hears those questions from anyone on Main Street about what is going on, only Wall Street. True as we on Main Street are just trying to survive. And with that we need to get hands on the checkbooks that have no problems writing them to go to space, to buy the biggest yachts, ranches and other bullshit accoutrements that define their existence. How many fucking Hermes Kelly Bags does one person need?

So cry me a river with your Billionaire’s tears and tell me what they are doing that is so great? Oh and I live by the rule of threes, so provide three solid examples and donating to charity is not one of them. Thanks I can wait.

Full Stop. Game On

I have enjoyed of late watching the antics of the “investor” community of Reddit take on Wall Street. Highly entertaining as it appears according to the white male power brokerages that and I quote from a comment at the Post:

The young punks putting their stimulus checks into no-fee trading need to be stopped by the SEC from attacking a key underpinning of the American financial system: “Creative Destruction,” whereby hedge funds drive weak companies out off business so the newly unemployed can find better jobs.

That is true “Creative Destruction” — not punks attacking over-extended hedge funds with poor risk management. That is nothing but sheer financial terrorism. The punks contribute nothing to American capitalism, whereas the hedge fund suits toss out decent campaign contributions. Also, hedge fund managers dress better and are not vulgar.

This is an SOS to America: Save Our Suits.

I am not sure where to begin with how this has thrown the suit wearers off the game. They created it, perfected it and have repeatedly made great successes and great failures in the game all while preserving their place in society. If you do not recall 2008 then I suggest reacquaint yourself with how that happened.

There are numerous movies and books on the subject about Wall Street, its culture and those who are vested in its operations. Barbarians at the Gate, Wall Street, Margin Call, Boiler Room, Wolf on Wall Street, Insider Trading, Too Big to Fail, Enron, and even Trading Places. Think Billions is fiction, to some degree. Same with Succession. The rich are different alright – they simply have more money to cover up their activities.

One individual who has come to the forefront of the current reactions to the Game Stop shenanigans is Steve Cohen. He is the current owner of the Mets and has been so upset he left Twitter. OMG! But Mr. Cohen has a much “richer” history when it comes to his own role in criminal activity regarding Wall Street.

This is Mr. Cohen as told by The New Yorker with regards to his background and the way his prosecution came to be. Funny the prosecutor was fired by Trump. Things that make you go hmm..

Cohen was a captivating figure on Wall Street. He was not the sort of investor who, like Warren Buffett, took a large stake in a company and held it for years, immersing himself in how the business worked. He was a short-term speculator, who had built a vast personal fortune by placing high-volume bets on small movements in stock prices; he was often driven by earnings announcements and other such events, and maintained high returns, against the odds, year after year. He was short and thick, had a fierce mind and a quick temper, and he lived in a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. A passionate art collector, he would spend a hundred million dollars or more on a single work.

And like all things Trump Rudolph Giuliani appears as a guest star in this story about Cohen.

Around the same time, Dennis Levine—a top mergers-and-acquisitions banker at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the firm where the junk-bond financier Michael Milken worked—was arrested and charged with orchestrating an immense insider-trading scheme. The arrest was just the beginning of a series of securities-fraud prosecutions—run by Rudolph Giuliani, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York—that dominated news headlines for months. The S.E.C. accused Levine of accumulating $12.6 million in illegal profits and froze his assets.

I love the word – assets – yes it suits them. Literally and metaphorically. As this past year Trump pardoned Michael Milken. I guess Giuliani was over it.

Wall Street is an inbred community with a revolving door to the White House as we have had numerous Goldman bankers work in the Treasury and in other Government positions and this I doubt will end. We have tried to have banking regulation in the past and we will again and it will revolve in and out like the employees do, as we learned in 2008 but that was then and this is now. I so miss theater as I truly want to see the play The Lehman Trilogy about how that banking house collapsed under the mortgage boon and bust of the time. Good times.

And just like the book by Michael Lewis, The Big Short, was made into a movie I no doubt he will write about this and the rag tag crew of Reddit investors, my personal favorite was “Doog” interviewed by the BBC; however they are all kinds of folks often called “dumb money” that run the gamut from Ministers to Gamers who are fighting against the suits to game their own system. Can’t wait for the movie, the “suit wearer” can be played by Russell Crowe who has no issue with a Twitter fight if needed.

But the real story is that of Robinhood, no not the mythical man who takes from the rich and gives to the poor, it is the company that exists as an app to assist day traders and small investors to buy into the market. On the surface they seem to be the good guy and then you dig deeper and they are the swamp dwellers like all the rest. Ah game on.

Robinhood and Citadel’s relationship comes into focus as Washington vows to examine stock-market moves

Trading firms at center of Reddit-fueled stock surges have worked closely to share users’ market data, build political influence

By Dougla MacMillan & Yeganeh Torbati Washington Post Jan. 29, 2021

Robinhood, the online trading app heralded by some as a democratizing force to empower small investors, has spent the past few years nurturing a close relationship with one of Wall Street’s biggest players and building ties with some of the most powerful institutions in Washington.

The Silicon Valley-based trading platform makes a large amount of revenue from Citadel Securities, a Chicago-based financial-services giant. Robinhood’s regulatory filings show the company charges large investment firms called “market makers” fees to access real-time information about which stocks its users are buying and selling, a practice some regulators and industry watchers have seen as a potential conflict of interest.

Robinhood routes more than half of its customer orders to Citadel, by far its largest market-making partner by volume, Robinhood disclosures show. The app also works with Virtu, G1 Execution Services, Wolverine and Two Sigma.

Robinhood’s relationships with these investment firms is likely to face new scrutiny after the online broker took the extraordinary step Thursday of limiting trading of certain stocks that were propelled to meteoric heights by conversations on Reddit message boards. After the trading halt, Reddit users accused Citadel and its billionaire founder, Ken Griffin, of pressuring Robinhood to limit trading of certain stocks, a move that may have prevented further losses for the short-sellers that lost billions betting against GameStop.

On Twitter and the Reddit forum Wallstreetbets, retail investors speculated that Robinhood had caved to pressure from its powerful business partner. Because the company does not charge its users any fees, a key part of Robinhood’s business model relies on Citadel and similar companies.

Josh Zeitz, a spokesman for Citadel Securities, said in a statement that the company “has not instructed or otherwise caused any brokerage firm to stop, suspend, or limit trading or otherwise refuse to do business.”

Citadel LLC, a separate hedge fund also founded by Griffin, recently helped bail out Melvin Capital, a fund that sank 30 percent in a few weeks after shorting GameStop.

The events triggered a swift response from a wide range of lawmakers, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who said they supported an investigation of Robinhood’s decision to block trading in GameStop. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) announced that the House Financial Services Committee would hold a hearing to examine how the market “has been manipulated by hedge funds and their financial partners to benefit themselves while others pay the price.”AD

Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for Ocasio-Cortez, told The Washington Post that the congresswoman believes “Citadel’s role needs to be examined.”

On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission said the agency was “closely monitoring” the stock-market volatility, which it said “has the potential to expose investors to rapid and severe losses and undermine market confidence.”

Robinhood announced it would allow “limited buys” of GameStop and other heavily shorted stocks to resume Friday, sending shares of GameStop soaring more than 70 percent.

Congress plans to examine Citadel’s agreement to obtain trading data from Robinhood in exchange for millions of dollars. These types of arrangements, called payments for “order flows,” have become more common in recent years and more lucrative during the pandemic trading boom of the past year. They have also drawn growing scrutiny from federal regulators who have raised concerns that they can hurt average investors.AD

Because of the GameStop frenzy, “the regulators have a chance to really examine what’s going on and get access to information about what these relationships really are like,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.

Robinhood and other brokerages cannot execute trades directly, so they usually work with market-making firms. Robinhood is required by law to work with market makers that can give their users the best market prices for a given trade. When Robinhood directs a transaction to one of these third parties, the market maker learns which security is being bought or sold before the trade happens.

Citadel and other market makers pay Robinhood a small fee for this privilege, which gives the market-making firms information about retail trading patterns. Citadel said it uses this information to improve its trading algorithms. Market makers also take a small profit on the “spread,” or difference in price between what a Robinhood user pays and the price at which the security is being sold in the market.AD

Robinhood generated $271 million from all order-flow payments in the first half of 2020, according to regulatory filings. Because it is a closely held company, Robinhood does not disclose how much of its total revenue comes from order-flow payments. A spokeswoman for Robinhood declined to comment on the company’s business model.

TD Ameritrade, another major online brokerage, generated about $560 million from those payments over the first half of 2020, but because the company makes money from other services, that represented only about one-fifth of its sales over that period.

Critics of these arrangements say they amount to a hidden tax on unsuspecting mom-and-pop investors. Democrat Carl Levin, a former senator representing Michigan, recently argued in an editorial for the Financial Times that the Biden administration should abolish the practice of order-flow payments.

Last month, Robinhood paid $65 million to settle a charge by the SEC related to its order-flow agreements. The federal agency found Robinhood had misled its users by failing to disclose the payments it received from investment firms and failing to find investment partners that offered the most competitive rates for executing trades.

At the time, Robinhood said in a statement that it has been fully transparent in its communications with customers about current revenue streams and that the settlement related to “historical practices that do not reflect Robinhood today.”

The new regulatory scrutiny around GameStop trading will test the political influence of two companies that have invested in building connections in Washington. Last year, Robinhood bulked up its regulatory staff, spent $275,000 lobbying the federal government and hired lobbyists with ties to a Wall Street regulator and congressional oversight committees, according to disclosure filings and an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.AD

Robinhood’s chief legal officer is Dan Gallagher, a Republican appointee to the SEC who served as a commissioner there from 2011 to 2015 and was known for his persistent criticism of the Dodd-Frank Act, financial regulation passed after the 2008 crisis. Beth Zorc, a lawyer who worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration after roles as a senior aide to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, joined Robinhood late last year to help oversee its federal lobbying efforts.

“There’s a lot of hard competition, but the financial sector is one of the worst, most egregious areas for revolving door between government and regulated industry,” Weissman said.

Citadel spent $520,000 on lobbying in 2020 and counted a former Treasury Department employee and a former tax aide on Capitol Hill among its lobbyists.

Citadel also paid Janet Yellen, President Biden’s newly installed treasury secretary, between $710,000 and $760,000 in speaking fees in 2019 and 2020, according to her financial disclosure forms. When asked in a news briefing Thursday about the payments and whether Yellen would recuse herself from advising Biden on issues related to Robinhood, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it is normal for experts such as Yellen to be paid for advice while not actively serving in a government role.

“The secretary of treasury is one of the world-renowned experts on markets, on the economy,” Psaki said. “It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone she was paid to give her perspective and advice.”

Citadel declined to comment on its lobbying or payments to Yellen.

Yellen said in her ethics agreement upon her nomination that she would seek written authorization before she participated “personally and substantially” in any matter involving Citadel or other financial firms she received speaking fees from.

Asked whether Yellen would seek that authorization, Treasury Department spokesman Calvin Mitchell did not respond directly. “Secretary Yellen of course will abide by her ethics pledge in all instances,” Mitchell said.

Covid Chronicles – the Doom Loop

When I read the stories of families and individuals who have struggled with long haul Covid, the families who never said good bye to their loved ones and the endless struggles of medical professionals to seek answers and find resolution to the never ending slog of Covid it does not take a village to realize how we need a leader to help us find the ways of building and rebuilding all that is broken.

We have many targets of ire, from the varying Governors who tried to assert leadership and instead contributed to the chaos, the endless parade of Medical Officials who seemingly had no answers, often contradicting themselves and of course the media who seems to grab any brass ring to fill the endless hours of news time with some relevant new spin on Covid. They need a dose of STFU frankly as they seemingly make it worse.

I am going to refer to the lengthy and comprehensive piece in The New Yorker, The Plague Year, by Lawrence Wright. Simply put it is a must read and with it you will see all the mishaps, mistakes and missteps made by varying players in this Covid Theater. And one for the record is Dr. Fauci and the Surgeon General, the Director of the CDC, and the FDA, the Secretary of HHS, as well as Steven Mnuchin who also felt that closing down the country in order to save lives was (I am using my own pun here) overkill. Even Birx who I have nothing but loathing for did at one point argued strongly that he was wrong and how many hundreds of thousands of deaths will it take to alter your negative view. In this data centric world there was none only projections by varying competitive Universities and again this is not that easy to predict. But this is what we were using and all of them or none of them had it right as no one can predict human behavior.

And that is where we are now. We have reached a point like the mass shootings where we no longer feel empathy or are driven by rage to force politicians to enact change and in turn we allow a minority to rule a majority and that is what it was like for me living in Nashville, fighting odds with people uneducated over religious and utterly obsessed with money. Our federal Government reminds me of Tennessee every day, mismanaged, poor communicators and utter liars.

What it takes is patience to read and comprehend both science and math. In the article I found it interesting that Birx and a colleague went on a cross country road trip to varying states to try to cajole and encourage the varying Governors of many States to embrace mask wearing. This of course came AFTER Fauci and the Surgeon General had stated that mask wearing was not necessary. And in the beginning Fauci did not agree that Covid was spread by asymptomatic carriers. Ah the what if’s and if only. This is the Doom Loop: “Our political system is caught in a “doom loop” of partisanship and polarization, as both major parties trade long-term institutional stability for short-term political gain in what they rationalize as a fight for the soul of our country.” And the Covid Task Force was formed and did little as it was where the arguments centered on political capital and tending to a vituperative volatile President versus actually doing what is right for the public and the people. Setting up camps to ensure one’s own position than doing right. The endless doom loop of going nowhere but trapped in a circle of jerks.

The article does have heroes and none of them are the players we see in the news or hear of, a Government employee who ironically was once a reporter. And he had front row to the greatest seat in the theater of the absurd as he watched one moron enter the room only to leave followed by another. Matt Pottinger, the deputy national-security officer whose brother was a Physician in off all places Seattle, a former Marine, who spoke Mandarin and had massive contacts in Asia as the outbreak began. He knew day one we are on ride to hell and while the idiots spun their tops he tried to figure out how and what to do right. And it was at the first meeting with Senators where Fauci and Robert Redfield (CDC) said at the briefing in January ” We are prepared for this.” Lie number one

The irony was that in 2019, the HHS dept. conducted a simulation called, the Crimson Contagion, which is to test the government’s response in a pandemic. It concluded that well you know the answer today. At that time nothing was done to remedy the shortcomings and issues that the test results provided.

But back to heroes who immediately began to do what the do best, dig into research and reaching out to colleagues in the field. One stands out, Dr. Barney S. Graham, the chief architect of the first authorized Covid vaccine. One of his partners in this venture is Jason McLellan who was studying HIV and that began the two to work together on the vaccine that is now being produced by Moderna. Again, if you think these are people on the money train, think again, the U.S. Government funded much of this (well so did Dolly Parton) and they own the patent rights.

Meanwhile the Doom Loop continues with another Oval Office meeting where in January Trump was warned that this was the big one, and told it would be the “biggest national security threat you will ever face.” At that same meeting Fauci said, “It would be unusual for an asymptomatic person to drive the epidemic in a respiratory disorder.” Lie #2.

I call them lies as at this point anyone in science and research should know there are no clear facts, no clear black and whites unless it has been studied, analyzed and verified. At that point in late January there was little to no information about Covid as China was covering its tracks and downplaying it globally while simultaneously locking down and shutting down anyone doing otherwise than keeping quiet. Even at this meeting the Kudlow idiot that Trump has an econ adviser thought it was not serious as apparently the stock market would somehow know this and reflect it. He asked if the money was dumb and then said, “Is everyone asleep at the switch. I have a hard time believing that.” He does not recall that remark. Lie #3

But another crackpot Trump adviser, Peter Navarro was the first to call for borders to be shut, equating it with a black swan event. And he was the odd man out.. not the first time but the first time he was actually right. His posture on this led him to be banned from future meetings. More crimes and misdemeanors follow.

And from this more began to devise the strategy to become what we know now, the quarantine lockdown. And the name, flatten the curve, came when Dr. Markel and a CDC director, Marin Cetron, devised while looking at a mass of Thai noodle takeout. There you go, inspiration in all forms.

By the end of February the reality that the virus was here and moving across the globe and the United States made a sense of urgency that required money, diligence and of course cooperation. Three things that our Government in its current state of the doom loop make such a challenge if not an impossibility. And again of all people Peter Navarro devises a budget for 3 Billion dollars to cover costs of an accelerated vaccine process, PPE equipment and other therapeutics. This passed muster with Secretary Azar but the access to the door via the “acting” chief of staff Mulvaney, was shut upon arrival. He gave an 8 Million pass as enough. And this begins the denial that fuels the jet for Trump to continue to equate Covid with the flu. Lie #4

By March the warnings were out and we know that in some states the emergency bell was ringing but here in New York, Mayor DiBlasio was encouraging people to eat out. Okay, then. Where do you suggest, Bellevue Hospital cafeteria?

The chaos that follows is all part of our current memory and is our recent history which is our current present. The idiocy, the lies presented by Trump alone are in double if not triple digits. His enablers and cult followers have continued to live in the river of denial that they float on the passenger ship to hell. The Governors who cruised their ships into ports of shit and bullshit are still pretending to helm the vessel with no more knowledge or skills that even the most green of Bosun’s on Bravo’s Below Deck possess. The reality is that much of this could have been, should have been, might have been prevented if not reduced had anyone gotten out of the circle of jerks and the doom loop. We can talk about the Nursing Home patients sent back Covid positive to infect others and themselves die, or how about the Veteran Homes such as the one in Massachusetts, so badly understaffed and underfunded, that aging Vets were shoved into single wards, not monitored, isolated nor cared for. Even in New York many patients so overwhelmed the system that one a Broadway director was shoved into a hall, where he soiled himself and was not given food nor water for 12 hours. Maybe he should have gone to the Javitz Center they had all of a 100 folks. Our health care system was as disabled and fractured as the patients they treated.

And here we are a country at risk with a President trying to jigger votes, find conspiracies where there are none and a coalition of Congress men and one idiot woman (from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn) trying to pander to this pathological liar. Covid is not going away, you cannot swipe right and rid yourself of it. This is the long haul, only without delusions, endless fevers, pain, breathing challenges, it is by far an easier one to truck. We have to wear masks, avoid small congregations and poorly ventilated spaces, such as bars and restaurants. Once again in Nashville, home of morons, I read where they are sure if the Mayor allowed the bars to stay open to 1 a.m that the spread of Covid would be reduced: “I think it was a mistake by the Health Department to not allow bars to stay open until 1 a.m.,” said Barrett Hobbs, chair of Metro’s hospitality recovery committee and owner of several downtown businesses. “The science shows that people gathering in homes is the largest viral spreader.”

Now this moron is well first a Tennessean, second a bar owner and third a white man. The biggest of all the liars in the lying world. For the record guess what? Wrong again.

The hospitalitysector’sprotestsaround the world over bans on their activities, limiting them at best to selling takeaways, contrasts with the scientific evidence: well-meaning restaurant and bar owners insist they have complied scrupulously with health and safety measures, but there is no getting away from the fact that a business where people must remove their masks in order to eat or drink, has increased infection rates.

At the aggregate level, the first study to portray the obvious correlation between restaurant openings and the spread of COVID-19 was published in June by Johns Hopkins University, using data on credit card spending by 30 million customers in the United States and correlating it to the evolution of the pandemic in each state. The relationship was clear: the more spending on restaurants, the greater the number of infections.

That study was followed by another, carried out by Stanford University and published on November 10. Using a very different methodology, the outcome was nevertheless the same: researchers tracked the smartphones of more than 98 million people between March and May, taking into account the number of times their subjects went to restaurants, gyms and hotels, and concluding that if restaurants were authorized to open at full capacity, they would be responsible for more than 600,000 infections in a city like Chicago, and that, in addition, the distribution was irregular and impossible to predict: 10% of the premises were responsible for 85% of the expected infections.

And yesterday I finished an article in the The New York Times Magazine about going forward with College Football and its role of spreading Covid while the same State leaders who were demanding a total lockdown capitulated on this one issue. Mike DeWine of Ohio is perhaps the biggest hypocrite in that crowded field.

They found this: The week the season resumed, the mayors of 11 of the 14 Big Ten cities wrote to the conference expressing their concern that football games would encourage people to congregate. “It’s a normal tradition on game day that you watch with other people,” Dr. Mysheika Roberts, the health commissioner for Columbus, told me. “And we’ve seen our cases go up. Since the first game, our cases have exploded.” When we spoke the week I visited Columbus, Roberts seemed confident that Ohio State’s football players could remain safe. They were motivated by both the carrot of being able to continue playing and the stick of a season potentially shut down if they helped foment an outbreak. She was less optimistic about Buckeye fans around the city and across Ohio. “We’re trying to change the behavior of all those people,” she said. “But what’s their motivation?”

Well it apparently is this….

At halftime, I left Ohio Stadium and headed to a party on West Lane Avenue, a few blocks from campus. By the time I arrived, Fields had thrown for another touchdown; I saw the replay on a television that someone had carried out to the lawn. At the time of the Rutgers game, the incidence of positive tests in Columbus approached 11 percent. Private gatherings were capped at 10 people. But these fans seemed to have created an exemption for themselves. Perhaps 50 people were gathered outside the multiunit brick building, which housed mostly students. Plastic cups of beer were being distributed from a wooden table. Nobody I saw wore a mask.

When Ohio State’s season finally started, several students told me, it was as though the party animals had been released from their cages. Football, said Kaleigh Murphy, a sophomore I talked with, “gave people a reason to get up on a Saturday and go to a frat and start drinking.” For Murphy, part of Ohio State’s allure was the spectacle of a football weekend. During the previous season, her group of friends would gather in the stadium parking lot before home games. Maybe they would eventually go in, maybe they wouldn’t. With no fans permitted this season, they moved their festivities elsewhere. “If people aren’t going to parties,” she said, “they’re at the bars.”

Later that night, I drove to the Short North neighborhood near downtown. At Seesaw, a restaurant and bar on the corner of East First Avenue and High Street, I saw revelers partying as though 2020 had never happened. There were five televisions on the ground floor and more upstairs. The bar was crowded with patrons, one for nearly every seat. Most seemed to be shouting. Two were kissing in a corner. Five were jammed around a table meant for four, playing a drinking game. Only the bartenders wore masks. It was Saturday night. “A football Saturday night,” the bouncer checking IDs at the door said.

Two days later, on Monday, Ohio’s 9,750 new coronavirus cases broke its existing record by more than 1,500. The state’s governor, Mike DeWine, addressed the crisis. He described the virus as a “runaway freight train.” He asked families to scale back their plans for the coming holiday season. Yet in terms of the impact across the state, every Ohio State game might as well have been its own Thanksgiving, just with different catering. DeWine was clearly mindful of the popularity of the Buckeyes among his constituents, which may explain why he wasn’t willing to try to curtail those weekly gatherings. When I asked him about it, his answer was blunt: “I can’t impact who you have over to eat pizza and watch the Ohio State game.”

So you see that all of this blustering and posturing and fear mongering accomplished only so much and we are where we are. We are in a perpetual doom loop. Hunker down as we still have a long winter left.

Go Boom Boom

When I read this yesterday I was neither shocked nor surprised. The reality is that we are nowhere near parity for women in the workplace. I have seen little change in the 30 years since my mother took me to a Women’s March, but I have seen more women in the workplace. Why? They have to regardless.

I am not sure it matters who stays home or even if anyone in a family should, but frankly with the cost of child care and the variations that can make a difference in a child’s development, you have to ask if we are ever going to find a place of equality for any citizen regardless of gender, color or creed.

 Then of course we have to break that down even further with more hierarchies and levels of status and identity that at one point that seems to be a problem in and of itself. Today I heard that since no Native Americans teach on Reservations they must be trained to teach Native children “differently.” Hmm, I am not sure what that means but it of course seems oddly discriminatory as if White people cannot teach objectively and then again why are there no Native Americans teachers?  Is that not a problem? We have many Native teachers here in Seattle yet they don’t want to teach their own people? Why is that? We used to even have a Native American oriented school, that fell away once its “chief” died.. yes pun intended. And two women here have been demanding a Native American curriculum and lauded at the White House but doesn’t see this issue also as a  problem and is willing to relocate to serve her people?  This is not about curriculum is it?  (I have subbed for her and she works at 3rd rate K-8 with a history of problems and she left a shitty movie to educate kids about Greek Mythology.  Yes Clash of the Titans is educational so I hope her Native curriculum is an improvement)

But this is how we fuck it up. We add layer to layer of intricacies that make it near impossible to see things as just “black or white.” You have any number of people capable of analyzing data, they are numbers with no other identification so really you need a white asshole to do that? Well yes if it means going to a strip club after work to snort coke of a whore’s ass.

This is the reality of Wall Street. They have not changed and you can lean in all you want – for a kiss.

Decades After ‘Boom-Boom Room’ Suit, Bias Persists for Women

By SUSAN ANTILLA
The New York Times
MAY 22, 2016

Twenty-six years after a co-worker at Smith Barney sexually assaulted her at work, Lisa Mays says she still trembles when she tells the story.

It was early one morning at the Walnut Creek, Calif., branch when a top-producing broker, the only other person in the building, followed Ms. Mays into her office and backed her into a corner.

“Before I knew it, he was lifting my skirt to get into my tights and I was begging him to stop,” she recalled in an interview.

The assault was cut short when another employee arrived. “And then, he just walked away like nothing happened,” Ms. Mays said of her attacker.

Ms. Mays, who worked as a wire operator, entering trade orders into the system for brokers, was one of 23 women who sued Smith Barney for sexual harassment and pay discrimination in an explosive class-action lawsuit filed 20 years ago this month. It became known as the “boom-boom room” suit, named after a basement party room at Smith Barney’s branch office in Garden City, N.Y. Nearly 2,000 women joined the case, exposing the sordid antics of Wall Street’s testosterone-driven culture.

Smith Barney paid $150 million in arbitration awards and settlements in the case, and it and other Wall Street firms rushed to set up anti-harassment training, employee hotlines and programs to recruit women.

Twenty years later, permanent change is less obvious.

“You may no longer have strippers coming for afternoon entertainment, but that doesn’t mean you are treated as an equal,” said Anne C. Vladeck of the New York employment law firm Vladeck, Raskin & Clark. “It’s not quite as blatant as what went on in the boom-boom room, but it’s still there in a way that makes it very hard for women to succeed. Companies on Wall Street are just not changing.”

Complaints persist about pay and promotion disparities and a lack of women in senior management roles, and frustrations are growing about the limited ability of individuals to seek damages in court.

Brokerage firms today say they deal swiftly with harassers and have developed programs to mentor and showcase high-achieving women. Branch managers at Morgan Stanley, which operated a brokerage joint venture with Smith Barney until acquiring it in 2013, can earn up to an additional $150,000 a year by recruiting and developing diverse advisers, a spokesman said. Last year, nearly 50 percent of financial adviser trainees hired were female or members of minority groups, he added.

He declined to say what percentage of the firm’s current brokers are women.

Women are slowly joining the senior ranks of Wall Street firms. Last year, women at Deutsche Bank represented 20.5 percent of the firm’s directors and managing directors, up from 17.1 percent in 2011, according to its 2015 human resources report. Goldman Sachs’s latest class of managing directors was 25 percent female, the highest proportion since that title was created in the mid-1990s.

The least progress has been made in pay. Last week, a managing director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch filed a gender-discrimination complaint in federal court in New York, noting that her 2015 bonus was $1.55 million while her male counterpart’s was $5.5 million. The bank has a “bros club” culture, the complaint says. A bank spokesman said, “We take all allegations of inappropriate behavior seriously and investigate them thoroughly.”

Last year, women filled 31 percent of jobs in the “securities, commodities and financial services sales agents” group tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but they earned only 52 cents for every dollar that men made, according to a study released last month by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington.

Among 119 job categories analyzed in the study, that group had the largest gender pay gap. By comparison, women on average make 79 cents for every dollar men make.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Ariane Hegewisch, a program director at the institute and co-author of the study. “I get calls from women who have come across our work and they say, ‘What do I do?’”

Ms. Hegewisch said that today’s female brokers repeatedly complain that men are circumventing reforms.

The 1996 suit against Smith Barney, as well as one in 1997 against Merrill Lynch, drew attention to the widespread practice of branch managers’ excluding of women when it was time to assign the accounts of departing brokers. Morgan Stanley’s spokesman said the company today uses a formulaic, gender-blind process for distributing accounts.

Ms. Hegewisch said, however, that senior male brokers at some firms were “forming teams of young white guys to work with old white guys, which means the accounts stay on the team and don’t get distributed” when older brokers retire.

In the boom-boom room era, some women complained that they couldn’t become brokers at all.

Roberta Thomann, a former sales assistant and one of the three women in the Smith Barney Garden City office who initiated the lawsuit, said in an interview that her bosses stopped her from studying for the exam to become a broker.

“They gave my books to a male sales assistant so that he could study,” Ms. Thomann said. “I never even got a chance.”

Linda D. Friedman, one of the lawyers who represented Ms. Thomann and the others, said that would not happen today. Neither would the “open and celebrated” brand of harassment of that era, she said.

Still, big producers can get special treatment. Ms. Mays’s attacker, for example, worked at Smith Barney, and then Morgan Stanley, for another 24 years after the episode at her office, despite her having reported it to his supervisor.

Julie Vasady-Kovacs, a former compliance supervisor at Deutsche Bank Securities, said in a 2010 lawsuit that a co-worker was promoted to managing director “despite having such a poor record on sexual harassment that DB will not permit him to have a female administrative assistant.” In court papers, Deutsche Bank denied the allegation.

In an email statement, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman said it promptly investigates allegations of gender discrimination and takes disciplinary action where appropriate.

Some of the behavior depicted in cases rivals the indignities of the boom-boom room, the Smith Barney party room that the lead plaintiff, Pamela K. Martens, had visited once, only to be grabbed by her branch manager and kissed on the lips.

Maria Garcia, a former Barclays Capital sales executive, described a similar incident at a conference in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2011, in her discrimination case, which is still in progress.

In her complaint, Ms. Garcia said she was at a business dinner when a male director at Barclays stopped by and kissed her on the lips in front of members of her team. She said that when she told her boss about the episode after returning to New York, he made it clear that he preferred she not report it to human resources.

A Barclays spokesman said the firm denies that Ms. Garcia was subjected to unlawful treatment.

A manager who left Deutsche Bank in 2010 was described in a deposition as being so intoxicated during an evening out that he “urinated against a wall in front of his employees.” In a court filing, the bank called the incident “hearsay.”

To Ms. Martens, who was a broker at Smith Barney, the biggest disappointment is that mandatory arbitration persists. She opted out of the settlement over the issue and never received money from the case.

The Smith Barney litigants devoted eight of their complaint’s 41 pages to criticisms of the practice of forcing employees to arbitrate civil rights claims.

“We felt that the underpinning of this abuse, whether it was physical abuse or sexual abuse or sexual assaults or sexual harassment, was the private justice system that Wall Street had carved out for itself,” Ms. Martens said in an interview. “I wanted to come away with ending mandatory arbitration for the entire industry, but, at a minimum, for civil rights cases.”

She did not get her wish.

Ms. Friedman, the lawyer, said that about 90 percent of the Wall Street women she represents do not have the option of going to court today. Typically, they agree to this in a “Dear Prospective Employee” letter that must be signed if they want the job, she said.

Increasingly, firms are prohibiting employees from participating in class actions. Morgan Stanley has mandatory arbitration and a class-action waiver.

“You couldn’t bring the boom-boom room case today,” Ms. Friedman said. “The biggest problem we face now is that the courthouse doors are closing

Call Me

 This comment relates to the below article and succinctly says what I have known for quite sometime, the push for STEM is not about jobs, careers or a need for workers, it is about supply and demand. If you increase the supply to meet the demand and then in turn have a surplus of the supply you can lower wages.  The median tech job has an annual salary of just over 100K in smaller urban cities, in Sillicon Valley it is higher (as is the cost of living).

Sent to the New York Times, Jan. 31
President Obama has called for “a Deeper Commitment to Computer Education,” (January 30), proposing that $4 billion be invested in computer science education. In the past, these proclamations were based on the assumption that there is a serious shortage of technology-trained workers in the US. This claim has been shown to be false. In fact, there is a surplus.

Now the message is that computer knowledge is needed in many professions. (The president mentioned auto mechanics and nursing.) But this is computer use, and does not require knowing how to program and design software.  It requires knowing how to use specific programs. It is not “computer science,” just as driving a car does not require deep knowledge of auto mechanics.  Nevertheless, the president emphasized programming and learning to code, “computer science for all.”\

My daughter has pointed out to me that to learn how to use many programs, all you need is a good friend to show you how

I was not surprised to read that the president of Microsoft thought the president’s proposal was a good idea.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California

 This article explains the breakdown in tech salaries and they are commensurately higher than in most other professions.  The reason being “supposedly” is that there is a lack of qualified applicants with matching skill set.   So by pushing everyone possible into a job description that currently has a median wage over 30% of that in most professions, the wages can drop or at least level off and in turn stagnate. It sort of allows an address to the problem of income inequality. Damn those tech geeks really are saving the world.

And no one is more beholden to the tech geeks than Obama. He courted them (wisely perhaps) in 2008 versus the Bankers as at that time they were persona non grata with the liberal set. But times change and the revolving door opens and closes with most of his staff going back to Wall Street. Just like former Governor John Kasich did when he went to Wall Street and worked at Lehmans while actually never leaving Ohio. That may have been a good thing for him, Lehman not so much. He should have made a few more calls.

Some however did elect to persue tech field and we have Jay Carney at Amazon and many others joining Al Gore in the valley as “venture capitalists” or to sit on boards.  Well venturing is hardly the word, as many will not even relocate, just cash the six figure paycheck and pretend to make a call. Must be nice, ask John Kasich.

Obama’s Budget Urges a Deeper Commitment to Computer Education
 By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
THE NEW YORK TIMES
 JAN. 30, 2016

WASHINGTON — President Obama will call for spending $4 billion to help states pay for computer science education in the schools when he presents his 2017 budget to Congress, administration officials say.

If approved by the Republican-led Congress, the money will pay for teacher training and instructional materials to increase the amount of instruction in computer science, especially for girls and minorities, the officials said.

Mr. Obama announced the initiative, called Computer Science for All, in his weekly radio address Saturday morning. He urged lawmakers to support the program’s funding in the budget, saying such education would help the nation’s young people succeed in a changing job market.

“In the new economy, computer science isn’t an optional skill — it’s a basic skill, right along with the three Rs,” Mr. Obama said in the address. “Nine out of 10 parents want it taught at their children’s schools.”

Officials said the president’s budget plan, to be officially rolled out on Feb. 9, also calls for sending $100 million directly to school districts to help start computer science education programs. And it directs the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service to spend more than $135 million in existing funds on teacher training over a five-year period beginning this year.

White House officials say the need is critical, in part because other nations are doing a better job educating young people in computer sciences, a fast-growing part of the global economy.

Only a quarter of the elementary, middle and high schools in the United States offer computer science classes, with 22 states not allowing such classes to count toward a diploma, officials said. Only 4,310 of 37,000 high schools in the country offer Advanced Placement computer science classes, they said, putting American children at a disadvantage.

“That’s what this is all about — each of us doing our part to make sure all our young people can compete in a high-tech, global economy,” Mr. Obama said. “They’re the ones who will make sure America keeps growing, keeps innovating and keeps leading the world in the years ahead.”

In addition to federal spending, Mr. Obama is urging private technology companies to do more to support computer science education.

Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, praised that effort in a conference call with reporters that the White House organized on Friday. He said the company, which has already invested in efforts to encourage computer science education, was beginning a 50-state campaign to expand it further.

He called the effort by Mr. Obama and the other companies a “social imperative” for schoolchildren.

“More than anything else, what we’ve learned is that computing and computer science have become foundational for the future,” Mr. Smith said. “This isn’t just a tech issue. This isn’t just an economic issue.”

                                       ——————————————————–

Just to prove a point here is a list of articles that discuss the reality of the STEM grads.  It is not a pretty picture. 

Sources: Salzman, H. & Lowell, B. L. 2007. Into the Eye of the Storm: Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1034801 Salzman, H. and Lowell, L. 2008.

Making the grade. Nature 453 (1): 28-30.Salzman, H. 2012. No Shortage of Qualified American STEM Grads (5/25/12) http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-foreign-stem-graduates-get-green-cards/no-shortage-of-qualified-american-stem-grads. Teitelbaum, M. 2014: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-teitelbaum-stem-fears-20140420,0,120851.story#axzz2zYCn7SCA; Weismann, J. 2013.

More Ph.D’s than the market can absorb:The Ph.D Bust: America’s Awful Market for Young Scientists—in 7 Charts. The Atlantic, Feb 20, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-bust-americas-awful-market-for-young-scientists-in-7-charts/273339/

The Glass, The Steagall, The Wall

I never understood President Obama’s fascination with the Clinton crowd once he took office and appointed many to prominent Cabinet and staff positions.  These were the individuals whose very economic policies contributed to the economic meltdown in 2008. 

I have no horse in the race and frankly will vote in November knowing that unless an act of God occurs, the status quo will remain firmly in place and it will be business as usual the following day.

I found this essay and he has his bias and that is apparent, but there is truth in his observations with regards to financial reform – it.will.not.happen.

I worked on Wall Street. I am skeptical Hillary Clinton will rein it in 

 Wall Street is very much intertwined with the Clinton’s. I doubt that will change anytime soon as Hillary Clinton continues to receive large donations from top bankers

Chris Arnade
The UK Guardian
Thursday 28 January 2016

 I owe almost my entire Wall Street career to the Clinton’s. I am not alone; most bankers owe their careers, and their wealth, to them. Over the last 25 years they – with the Clinton’s it is never just Bill or Hillary – implemented policies that placed Wall Street at the center of the Democratic economic agenda, turning it from a party against Wall Street to a party of Wall Street.

 That is why when I recently went to see Hillary Clinton campaign for president and speak about reforming Wall Street I was skeptical. What I heard hasn’t changed that skepticism. The policies she offers are mid-course corrections. In the Clintons’ world, Wall Street stays at the center, economically and politically. Given Wall Street’s power and influence, that is a dangerous place to leave them. Salomon Brothers hired me in 1993, seven months after President Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

Getting a job had been easy, Wall Street was booming from deregulation that had begun under Reagan and was continuing under Clinton. Hillary Clinton: my speeches for Wall Street haven’t led to conflict of interest.

When Bill Clinton ran for office, he offered up him and Hillary (“Two for the price of one”) as New Democrats, embracing an image of being tough on crime, but not on business. Despite the campaign rhetoric, nobody on the trading floor I joined had voted for the Clinton’s or trusted them. Few traders on the floor were even Democrats, who as long as anyone could remember were Wall Street’s natural enemy. That view was summarized in the words of my boss: “Republicans let you make money and let you keep it. Democrats don’t let you make money, but if you do, they take it.”

 Despite Wall Street’s reticence, key appointments were swinging their way. Robert Rubin, who had been CEO of Goldman Sachs, was appointed to a senior White House job as director of the National Economic Council. The Treasury Department was also being filled with banking friendly economists who saw the markets as a solution, not as a problem. Hillary Clinton proposes several new taxes ‘to rein in Wall Street’

 The administration’s economic policy took shape as trickle down, Democratic style. They championed free trade, pushing Nafta. They reformed welfare, buying into the conservative view that poverty was about dependency, not about situation. They threw the old left a few bones, repealing prior tax cuts on the rich, but used the increased revenues mostly on Wall Street’s favorite issue: cutting the debt

 Most importantly, when faced with their first financial crisis, they bailed out Wall Street. That crisis came in January 1995, halfway through the administration’s first term. Mexico, after having boomed from the optimism surrounding Nafta, went bust. It was a huge embarrassment for the administration, given the push they had made for Nafta against a cynical Democratic party. Money was fleeing Mexico, and much of it was coming back through me and my firm. Selling investors’ Mexican bonds was my first job on Wall Street, and now they were trying to sell them back to us. But we hadn’t just sold Mexican bonds to clients, instead we did it using new derivatives product to get around regulatory issues and take advantages of tax rules, and lend the clients money.

Given how aggressive we were, and how profitable it was for us, older traders kept expecting to be stopped by regulators from the new administration, but that didn’t happen. When Mexico started to collapse, the shudders began. Initially our firm lost only tens of millions, a large loss but not catastrophic. The crisis however was worsening, and Mexico was headed towards a default, or closing its border to money flows. We stood to lose hundreds of millions, something we might not have survived. Other Wall Street firms were in worse shape, having done the trade in a much bigger size.

The biggest was rumored to be Lehman, which stood to lose billions, a loss they couldn’t have survived. As the crisis unfolded, senior management traveled to DC as part of a group of bankers to meet with Treasury officials. They had hoped to meet with Rubin, who was now Treasury secretary. Instead they met with the undersecretary for international affairs who my boss described as: “Some young egghead academic who likes himself a lot and is wide eyed with a taste of power.”

That egghead was Larry Summers who would succeed Rubin as Treasury Secretary. To the surprise of Wall Street, the administration pushed for a $50bn global bail-out of Mexico, arguing that to not do so would devastate the US and world economy. Unmentioned was that it would have also devastated Wall Street banks.

 The bailout worked, with Mexico edging away from a crisis, allowing it to repay the loans, at profit. It also worked wonders on Wall Street, which let out a huge sigh of relief. The success encouraged the administration, which used it as an economic blueprint that emphasized Wall Street. It also emphasized bailouts, believing it was counterproductive to let banks fail, or to punish them with losses, or fines or, God forbid, charge them with crimes, and risk endangering the economy.

The use of bailouts should have also been a reason to heavily regulate Wall Street, to prevent behavior that would require a bailout. But the administration didn’t do that; instead they went the opposite direction and continued to deregulate it, culminating in the repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999. It changed the trading floor, which started to fill with Democrats.

 On my trading floor, Robert Rubin, who had joined my firm after leaving the administration, held traders attention by telling long stories and jokes about Bill Clinton to wide-eyed traders. Wall Street now had both political parties working for them, and really nobody holding them accountable. Now, no trade was too aggressive, no risk too crazy, no behavior to unethical and no loss too painful. It unleashed a boom that produced plenty of smaller crisis (Russia, Dotcom), before culminating in the housing and financial crisis of 2008.

 The response to that crisis was Mexico 1995 writ large: bailout the banks and save Wall Street. This time executed by an Obama administration filled with veterans of the Clinton administration, including Hillary Clinton and Larry Summers. Prior to joining Obama’s administration as a senator, Hillary Clinton voted to bail-out the banks, a vote she still defends. More than 23 years following Bill Clinton’s election, Wall Street is very much intertwined with the Clinton’s: they helped fundamentally change Wall Street, and Wall Street fundamentally changed the Democratic party.

So maybe they really do know what it takes to reform both. Maybe. Except that Hillary Clinton continues to receive large donations from top bankers. Ask anyone who has spent the last two decades on Wall Street which politicians have worked for them the hardest and most will grudgingly admit it’s the Clinton’s. I doubt that will change anytime soon.

Boys and Their Toys

The Silicon Valley is awash with new money and new money in the Valley is not like Wall Street new money which is blown up the nose, on the hookers and expensive food at Per Se for $325 dollars per plate (without wine), no,  this is the we are saving the world bullshit that they dish out with Chipolte coupons.  I can see that choosing which group I would rather sup with is easy on that one. If I am hanging with douchebags I am still going to go with quality eats despite the review.

And so it was not surprising that this week announced the sale of the New Republic, bought last year with much disruption to the point of most of the staff walking. Hey old money did this too with Sheldon Adelson’s purchase of the Las Vegas Journal Review but without all the subterfuge.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, chief apologist for the Wall Street crowd, has no love lost for the new money crowd of the other coast.  This week’s column is about the ways the new money set have lofty ideas and equally lofty goals that they abandon once failed.  What he neglected was the floundering attempt by the husband of the New Republic’s owner in chief to buy public office like old money does by buying a home in a district and running for local election. Like the New Republic it didn’t work out either.

The Valley trumps itself as the epitome of meritocracy and the reality is like old boys network with sexism and classism running rampart. The Guardian released a study that found over 60% of the women in the tech sector faced some type of sexual harassment or gender discrimination.  Shocking, I know. Not really.

And this is another industry that is in deep denial about the matter. As this chart from Mother Jones from last year demonstrates the level of discrimination in the varying professional sectors.

Aside from sexism there is the issue of hiring equality across color lines that are not from Asia, and in turn the income inequality that furthers the divide as this article from Wired of last year discusses. 

When I read this bullshit piece in Fortune the first words that came to mind was my mother’s warning “note the source.”  This individual is connected to the Obama White House and that cache alone is enough to eliminate any sense of hunting in the phrase “job search.”  I loved the fake ad placements as endorsements, I hope he was compensated.

This essay in the Daily Kos of course is a contrast to that piece as it discusses the history of this issue and the long term wage gap as the unicorns come riding back into the barn and the long term affect that may have on the economy is still an issue as more standard companies such as GM’s investment in Lyft marks.

Then this essay from a Silicon Valley investor PRAISING income inequality brings the guff in aws when one reads his support of this divisive issue. 

Many of the Obama staffers have done the revolving door to tech industry jobs. His was the first Presidency to really corral the long apolitical and largely Libertarian followers to serve and then leave for cushy stock options that the Valley proffers vs those of Wall Street bonuses, but they too are appreciating the exodus to their doors as well.

And as we await the start of the State of the Union know that this matter will not change and that in reality we are as fucked as we were 8 years ago but just with more lube this time.

Tale of Two Thieves

Two men, two thieves, two highly educated and trained and yet they are common pyramid schemers

The first is a “Yalie” and the notation that he was not actually ripping people off as just badly educated/trained was laughable. Says a lot about that six figure Ivy League Degree.

The second is a Wall Streeter. Shocking no. The fact is that both of them disrupted their clients and investors.

The first hipster dude is so hilarious and so conventional but once again the up by the bootstraps nonsense of starting his business in his dorm room. Ah yes the Zuckerberg lore that has no replaced the garage lore of Jobs. Good one that I never tire of.

And of course the failed movie deals, he should meet Sonja Morgan the New York Housewife who claims she lost her money from the same type of deal.

The second is a second rate Bernie Madoff.

What more can I add except that neither will ever see prison. Yet if you and I ripped off a grandma for her S&H Greenstamps (an old reference) we would be in jail.

Old money versus new money it is all the same – stolen money.

The end.

A Yale Graduate Leaves a Trail of Ventures and Debts

By MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN
APRIL 16, 2015

In many ways, Joshua Bryce Newman fits the part of the young, successful entrepreneur.

A 35-year-old Yale graduate, Mr. Newman began investing in Internet start-ups during his junior year. After college, he ran an independent movie production company in New York and helped found two popular CrossFit gyms in Manhattan. His website cites several news articles that describe him as “a Silicon Valley pro” and “an Internet elder statesman,” and as being “sharp and supremely confident.”

But some of the nearly two dozen people who have either invested with Mr. Newman or lent him money over the last decade paint a less favorable picture. In lawsuits that have been filed against Mr. Newman or companies he controls, investors say that he has a history of bouncing checks, unpaid debts and misrepresented intentions.

While the total amount in dispute appears to be relatively small — roughly a few million dollars — the way Mr. Newman has managed to raise money easily from sophisticated businessmen, many with a track record of investing in Internet start-ups, is a vivid reminder of how the right connections and a strong sales pitch can seduce investors, even after the financial crisis.

Key Dates in Mr. Newman’s Investments

1997 Mr. Newman enters Yale, where he says he became managing partner of a fund seeding student start-ups.
2000 He is featured in an article in The Wall Street Journal about dorm-room venture capitalists.
2002 A year after graduation, he founds Cyan Pictures, which produces and distributes a few low-budget films.
2004 With three partners, he opens CrossFit NYC, a gym focusing on programs used by the military and police.
2011 Cyan closes, in part because of a dispute over a film project about the Yankees for which he was raising funds.
2014 Partners in CrossFit NYC oust him from the company.
2015 A pro fitness league, for a second time, asks him to stop soliciting investments in its name.

The investors include a co-founder of a social messaging site that was acquired by Google and a founder of an online apparel company. They were typically introduced to Mr. Newman at a Yale event, in a casual meeting at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah or on the recommendation of someone in the close-knit community of so-called angel investors in technology start-ups.

Several investors, some of whom declined to speak on the record because of continuing litigation, said they had been reassured by Mr. Newman’s background and by favorable media coverage, including several articles in The New York Times. Due diligence can be an afterthought for investors in start-ups and independent movies, businesses in which failure is not uncommon. And indeed few said they had looked into Mr. Newman’s past by checking court records or lien filings before investing in his projects.

“Two people I know vouched for him and said, “He is a friend of ours and is cool,’ ” said Richard Webb, an angel investor and marketing consultant who lives in New York and has invested in technology start-ups including Circa, Foursquare and Percolate.

Mr. Webb lent $250,000 to Mr. Newman in 2010, and won a court-ordered judgment against him the following year when the loan was not repaid.

“He would do a lunch with me and try to make it all good,” Mr. Webb said. “He came up with a couple of thousand dollars in 2012, and then he disappeared.”

While lenders and investors describe a pattern of such behavior, Mr. Newman’s string of bad debts may simply be a reflection of poor business skills.

For his part, Mr. Newman said in an interview that he understood that his investors were upset, but he said that he had made a good-faith effort to repay some of them. He declined to comment further on the record, except to say that he was working on a plan to reimburse investors to whom he owed money.

“The sane thing would have been for me to bankrupt myself,” Mr. Newman said. “For seven years, I’ve tried to make everyone whole. It’s the morally right thing to do.”

On Monday, Mr. Newman made a $50,000 payment to Joshua A. Adler, a real estate investor who lent $100,000 in November to Outlier Capital, a small venture capital firm that Mr. Newman controls. In March, Mr. Adler, a Yale alumnus, sued Mr. Newman and Outlier in Delaware state court, claiming that Mr. Newman had defaulted on the loan and refused a request to repay it.

“Mr. Adler recently received a payment on behalf of Mr. Newman,” said John G. Harris, Mr. Adler’s lawyer. “That payment reduces, but does not satisfy, the amount in controversy.”

“The suit goes on,” he added.

Several investors said they were concerned that Mr. Newman was continuing to raise money for new ventures, including one that supposedly has an equity investment in the National Pro Grid League, a new association of teams that compete in various feats of strength in the United States.

In September, a lawyer for the eight-team league, which had its inaugural season last year, sent a cease-and-desist notice to Mr. Newman telling him to stop telling prospective investors that he was raising money for the league, according to documents reviewed by The Times. The documents also show that Mr. Newman told investors that he intended to raise an initial $5 million for the new sports league.

James Kean, chief executive of the National Pro Grid League, said that Mr. Newman was “not affiliated” with the league in any way.

The trail of litigation against Mr. Newman began with Cyan Pictures, an independent movie production company he founded in Manhattan in 2002. The company, which Mr. Newman started a year after graduating from Yale, bet much of its success on “Keeper of the Pinstripes,” a low-budget baseball movie based on a novel about the Yankees.
Continue reading the main story

Document: Lawsuit Against Yale Graduate

The movie was never made, though the rights to the project are still held by Samarian Productions.

By 2010, the financial problems at Cyan had begun to mount, court records show. It is not clear if Mr. Newman ever raised the $9 million that he had said would be needed to begin making the film. But his struggles to get the film produced prompted him to take out short-term loans — many of which he later defaulted on, court records show.

A few of the investors in Cyan have been paid back in full. Steven Voichick, a Georgia businessman, received nearly $500,000 in November 2014 after a court ordered Mr. Newman to pay in 2010. In late 2014, Mr. Newman also paid an old $350,000 debt to Nic Radkowsky, a Brooklyn artist who had provided a bridge loan to Cyan.

Raised in Silicon Valley, Mr. Newman graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1997, just as the first Internet start-up boom was taking hold. At Yale, Mr. Newman majored in cognitive science, a field that combines elements of computer science, neuroscience and psychology. By his junior year, Mr. Newman has said, he was a managing partner in the Silicon Ivy Venture Fund, which provided seed money to start-ups backed by college students.

The Wall Street Journal featured him in an April 2000 article about dorm-room venture capitalists. A number of other business publications, including Forbes, also wrote profiles of Mr. Newman.

Cyan was his first big endeavor. The firm produced and distributed a handful of small movies that were made on shoestring budgets, like “Coming Down the Mountain,” released in 2003.

But Mr. Newman’s big bet was the Yankees film, and he went to several Sundance film festivals to find prospective investors. The project floundered, however, as a dispute arose over whether the Yankees would cooperate. Cyan closed in 2011.

Investors, former employees of the company and the Screen Actors Guild, now called SAG-Aftra, all filed lawsuits against Cyan and Mr. Newman. In all, creditors and investors obtained judgments or filed claims totaling about $2 million.
The vice president for finance at Cyan was Alexander Chatfield Burns, who after the movie production company closed went on to establish a private equity firm, Southport Lane Management, that is now being scrutinized by insurance examiners. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the firm transferred millions of dollars of insurance assets into potentially risky investments. It appears that Mr. Newman and Mr. Burns have not worked together since Cyan shuttered its operation.

Even as Cyan was trying to establish itself in the movie world, Mr. Newman was looking to reinvent himself. He entered a business partnership with three others in 2004 to open CrossFit NYC, a gym that focuses on extreme strength and conditioning programs used by police academies and military training units. Over the decade, Mr. Newman has appeared in three articles in The Times discussing the popularity of such training methods.

Still, the Cyan debts never went away.

Michael Stolper, a lawyer for seven people who put a combined $1.2 million into a CrossFit NYC investment vehicle, said that his clients’ money never went toward its intended purpose of expanding the business. Mr. Stolper said his investors, who intend to file a suit, are investigating whether Mr. Newman used the money to pay off some of his older debts.

Last summer, Mr. Newman’s partners, after learning that he had been accused of misleading investors, dismissed him from the company.

“Josh was fully divested of his interest in the company for cause,” Hari Singh, one of his former CrossFit NYC partners, said in an email. “Josh has no ownership, management or employee relationship with CrossFit NYC.”

Undeterred, Mr. Newman began raising money for a new fitness training company called Northstar CrossFit. He also began raising money for a venture called National Pro Fitness League Holdings, which he said had an equity stake in the National Pro Grid League, the upstart competitive fitness league.

Both these enterprises have drawn questions. Most of the people Mr. Newman hired for Northstar quit over concerns about his business practices, said Caroline Johnston Polisi, a lawyer for one of them. The National Pro Grid League says that it has had nothing to do with Mr. Newman for a year.

On Monday, the league sent a second cease-and-desist notice to Mr. Newman.

Former JPMorgan Chase Broker Charged in $20 Million Fraud

 By MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN
THE NEW YORK TIMES
APRIL 16, 2015

A former JPMorgan Chase broker treated accounts maintained by his clients as his own personal piggy bank — using about $20 million in client money to make unprofitable options trades and even paying down the mortgage on his New Jersey home, according to a federal criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday.

Federal authorities accused Michael J. Oppenheim, 48, of embezzling money from his clients for the last four years. The authorities say he told the clients that he was taking money from their accounts to invest mainly in low-risk municipal bonds. Instead, Mr. Oppenheim put much of that money into three online brokerage accounts he had opened for himself or in his wife’s name at other financial firms, according to the complaint.

“He concealed their money in a game of hide-and-seek and personally benefited from illegitimately obtained profits,” Diego Rodriguez, the leader of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York office, said in a statement.

Agents with the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Oppenheim Thursday morning at his home in Livingston, N.J.

Mr. Oppenheim worked at JPMorgan from 2002 until about a month ago. For most of the time, Mr. Oppenheim was an investment adviser with Chase Investment Services, which is affiliated with the big bank’s retail arm as opposed to its wealth management division.

The bank said it alerted federal authorities to the apparent theft and misuse of client money, which the authorities said included unauthorized transfers of money from client accounts.

Prosecutors for Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for Manhattan, also charged Mr. Oppenheim with wire fraud, securities fraud and investment adviser fraud in the 17-page criminal complaint.

Mr. Oppenheim’s lawyer, Robert Gamburg, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a related lawsuit, the Securities and Exchange Commission characterized the money-losing options trades Mr. Oppenheim made as “sizable.” Regulators said he made bets on the share price of the technology giants Apple and Google, as well as the auto manufacturer Tesla and the online video company Netflix.

To cover up his embezzlement, the authorities said, Mr. Oppenheim sent his clients fraudulent account statements. The criminal complaint makes reference to at least a half-dozen clients whose money may have been misappropriated by the former broker.

The authorities said Mr. Oppenheim typically transferred money from his client accounts by writing cashier’s checks and depositing them into the brokerage accounts controlled by his wife or by him. Sometimes the money was wired to accounts controlled by Mr. Oppenheim.

“At least one outgoing wire was used to pay off a portion of the mortgage on his and his wife’s home in New Jersey,” according to the S.E.C. complaint.

Mr. Oppenheim’s wife, Alexandra, was not charged with any wrongdoing. But she was named as a relief defendant by the S.E.C., meaning that regulators can recoup from her any ill-gotten money she may have received.

“We are sorry and angry this happened,” said Michael Fusco, a JPMorgan spokesman. “We always stand by our customers and will ensure no customer who had their money stolen will lose any funds related to this.”

Blind Leading Blind

And that summarizes the regulators of the banks over the last two decades.

As now Met Life becomes designated “too big to fail” it appears that another private company will get bail outs and taxpayer supported dollars should they go the way of AIG, Goldman, Bank of America, GM, fill in the blank. All while wrapping up the TARPS and other assorted programs meant to bail out the nation. Clearly some programs worked while others were largely slight of hand and one means slight as in actual assistance to the great unwashed.

The notion of self management was truly shoved down the collective throats thanks to Randian disciple Alan Greenspan. He and his acolytes made sure that the belief the private sector knew more and would act on their best interests and clearly they did. It was just their best interests had no overlap with anyone else’s.

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind and when it comes to Wall Street we turn a blind eye.

This is Floyd Norris’ last column in the New York Times, he too a casualty of the loss of profit in the media interest and I suspect took the buyout offered to staff to stave off more cutbacks. That unfortunately did not happen and the Times will be laying off more people. And I thought the economy was doing better. Guess its better if you are the right side of the street.

When Regulators Are Blind to Rules
DEC. 18, 2014
By FLOYD NORRIS

What happens when you turn over regulatory responsibilities to people who think there is really no need for regulation?

The United States, and much of the world, tried that for a large part of the last quarter-century. Along the way, a series of crises sent out warning signals that were not heeded.

After the economy recovered from the stock market crash of 1987, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman who had poured money into the market to stem the damage, was celebrated as a hero. He believed in what came to be derided as “market fundamentalism,” holding that markets were far smarter than governments and would produce optimal results if only there were no interference from politicians.

That analysis certainly seemed reasonable through much of the 1990s. The economy grew without a recession for 10 years, the longest such stretch in United States history. A few people worried that bad things could happen as a result of the explosive growth in derivative securities, but they were largely marginalized by the obvious fact that only good things were happening.

One reason recessions were previously more common was that the Fed often found itself — in the words of William McChesney Martin Jr., the chairman of the Fed from 1951 to 1970 — “in the position of the chaperone who has ordered the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up.”

He made that remark in 1955, after the Fed raised interest rates repeatedly, seeking to slow the economy even though the inflation rate was close to zero. Fed officials, The New York Times reported at the time, cited “the continued buoyancy of the stock market” as a reason to fear that “the surge of economic growth has enhanced expectations of growth beyond reasonable limits.”

That was exactly what was happening in the late 1990s, but Mr. Greenspan saw no reason to be concerned about rapidly rising asset prices. Was it not clear that markets were efficient?

Starting in 1997, a series of crises appeared to be unrelated. Each was viewed as an extraordinary event.

It went largely unnoticed that those crises had something in common: destabilizing factors caused by financial innovation and the lack of regulation.

That was true in Asia, where countries had followed the advice of groups like the International Monetary Fund and done nothing to control huge flows of capital into their economies. When the news turned bad, that capital tried to flee. Currencies collapsed and bailouts ensued.

Then came the collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund. It had used too much leverage as it traded derivative securities with strategies that assumed some market relationships were sure things. The Fed had to step in to persuade — some might say force — the big banks to bail out the fund.

As share prices rose in the 1990s, many concluded that the stock market was a sure thing, at least in the long run. A book called “Dow 36,000” became a best seller. People quit good jobs to join start-ups, hoping that stock options would make them rich when their new employer went public. Silicon Valley won a bitter battle to keep company books from having to reflect the real value of the options being handed out, arguing in essence that the party might end if that happened.

Executives at more than a few companies — Enron and WorldCom being the most notable — cooked the books to allow themselves to share in the riches.

When share prices of high-flying technology and telecommunications companies collapsed in 2000 and 2001, the scandals led to passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which for the first time created a regulator to pay attention to the auditors, whose work had been woefully inadequate. Wall Street analysts faced new rules on the theory that they had promoted stocks they knew were worthless.

But few wanted to mess with the financial engineers.

Instead, their standing only grew. Bank capital rules came to allow the banks to use their own — presumably sophisticated — models to calculate how much capital was needed for any asset they owned. Countries like Ireland and Iceland developed large banking systems and were hailed for finding high-paying, nonpolluting jobs.

“All the new financial products that have been created in recent years contribute economic value by unbundling risks and reallocating them in a highly calibrated manner,” Mr. Greenspan said in early 2000. “The rising share of finance in the business output of the United States and other countries is a measure of the economic value added by the ability of these new instruments and techniques to enhance the process of wealth creation.”

Mr. Greenspan was far from the only one to be entranced by the wisdom of Wall Street. In another speech that spring, Lawrence Summers, the Treasury secretary at the time, discussed the problems of “market overconfidence, the toxic combination of overleverage and illiquidity, nontransparency and the risks that hedging strategies and models may not live up to their design” that had been demonstrated by Long-Term Capital Management’s collapse.

But did that mean Washington needed to act? Far from it.

“Let me be clear,” Mr. Summers said in a speech to the Futures Industry Association. “It is the private sector, not the public sector, that is in the best position to provide effective supervision. Market discipline is the first line of defense in maintaining the integrity of our financial system.”

And it was to be the only line. Later that year, with bipartisan support, Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. That act barred the regulation of over-the-counter derivatives.

Had there been such regulation, it is at least possible that the financial crisis might have been less severe than it was. To a significant extent, derivatives enabled risk to be shifted from those who understood it to those who did not. Securities deemed risk-free by the rating agencies turned out to be worthless. Much of the financial innovation that so impressed Mr. Greenspan had been designed to let banks find ways to reduce their capital levels without the regulators noticing.

“I hear about these wonderful innovations in the financial markets and they sure as hell need a lot of innovation,” Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, said in late 2009. He said two of them — credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations — had nearly destroyed the economy.

Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story “The most important financial innovation that I have seen the past 20 years,” he added, “is the automated teller machine.”

There is still good reason to think that markets are better at allocating capital than are governments. But if the events leading up to the financial crisis proved anything, it is that markets freed of meaningful oversight did a horrible job.

After the crisis, financial regulation was stepped up around the world. Significantly, the countries that seem to have been the most vigilant in raising bank capital standards are the United States, Britain and Switzerland. They are the countries that have the biggest financial sectors — and thus the most to lose if their banks again teeter on the brink of collapse.

Perhaps the standard Walter Lippman set in 1933 — that a good crisis is one that leads to solutions of the problems that caused the crisis — was met. But the new reforms have not been tested.

It could be that the test is beginning in Russia, where the ruble has collapsed to the point that Russian merchants are reluctant to accept it. Capital is fleeing, and Russia appears to be hesitant to use its vaunted foreign exchange reserves to defend the currency. The government says it will not impose capital controls, but such promises only serve to increase fears they will be broken.

In the 1960s, when exchange rates were fixed — at least until a crisis forced action — there was a saying: “He lied like a finance minister on the eve of devaluation.”

The important issue for the world’s financial system is the extent to which the crisis can be contained. Russian companies owe a lot of euros and dollars, and the lenders — banks and bondholders — could suffer substantial losses. Such losses could force them to sell other assets, spreading the crisis. Already stock markets and currencies in other emerging markets are losing value, reflecting the fear of contagion. We can hope that Western banks really do have enough capital cushion to weather any storm that may develop.

In normal times, a country in trouble can turn to the I.M.F. for a bailout, albeit one with strings. Russia probably cannot do that on terms it would be willing to accept, given Western anger over its actions in Ukraine.

Indeed, wags are already suggesting a title for a book to be written about the crisis: “Crimean Punishment.”

The Barter System

Today it was announced that the bonuses for the white shoe law firms are back. David Boies one of the Attorney’s who seems to be linked to liberal causes although frankly he has demonstrated that cause is not effect and he will represent anyone who pays him as that is what a Lawyer is all about, his firm leads the bonus awards. Shocking? Not really.

And then there is the new approach to law school, arguing about tuition before admission. Getting a head start frankly on a career in arbitration no doubt.

Well better than entering the field of education as it too is a career where it is under fire yet most Teachers barely make ends meet. But keep talking about those Teacher’s union! In the Seattle area a Teacher working in an adjacent district makes 10K less. Substitute teaching for many average between $11 to $15/hour. And there is much ad o about supposed sub shortages across the country. Shocking but flipping burgers is less hassle and better pay.

But don’t rush as for many college is not on the 4 year plan, it is more like 6 and in turn costs more without any guarantee that this paper will get you the job you need or want. Accountability only applies to you and the student loan that follows you for life. As for income that is a dish best left cold as more and more Americans are finding it tough to make ends meet.

So the best gig is finding Wall Street jobs. The revolving door is paved with gold.

Nothing says hope more than asking an 18 year old to make a career and educational decision that can affect their lives forever. No wonder we have eliminated meritocracy as that is just too hard! Income inequity serves the status quo just fine.

Most College Students Don’t Earn a Degree in 4 Years, Study Finds

By TAMAR LEWIN
DEC. 1, 2014

The vast majority of students at American public colleges do not graduate on time, according to a new report from Complete College America, a nonprofit group based in Indianapolis.

“Students and parents know that time is money,” said the report, called “Four-Year Myth.” “The reality is that our system of higher education costs too much, takes too long and graduates too few.”

At most public universities, only 19 percent of full-time students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, the report found. Even at state flagship universities — selective, research-intensive institutions — only 36 percent of full-time students complete their bachelor’s degree on time.

Nationwide, only 50 of more than 580 public four-year institutions graduate a majority of their full-time students on time. Some of the causes of slow student progress, the report said, are inability to register for required courses, credits lost in transfer and remediation sequences that do not work. The report also said some students take too few credits per semester to finish on time. The problem is even worse at community colleges, where 5 percent of full-time students earned an associate degree within two years, and 15.9 percent earned a one- to two-year certificate on time.

The lengthy time to graduate has become so much the status quo that education policy experts now routinely use benchmarks of six years to earn a bachelor’s degree and three years for an associate degree.

“Using these metrics may improve the numbers, but it is costing students and their parents billions of extra dollars — $15,933 more in cost of attendance for every extra year of a public two-year college and $22,826 for every extra year at a public four-year college,” the report said. “Hands down, our best strategy to make college more affordable and a sure way to boost graduation rates over all is to ensure that many more students graduate on time.”

Each year, the report said, 1.7 million students begin college in remediation, including a majority of community college students — but only one in 10 remedial students ever graduate.

Also, 60 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients change colleges, with almost half of them losing some of their credits when they transfer.

Too much choice in college catalogs contributes to the problem, the report said, often overwhelming 18-year-olds “with an enormous cafeteria of possibilities in the college curriculum” and too few counselors to help them chart their course.

Tuition borrowers who do not graduate on time take on far more debt in their extra years, the report found. According to data from Temple University in Philadelphia and from the University of Texas, Austin, two extra years on campus increases debt by nearly 70 percent.

While there is widespread agreement that graduation rates are too low, some education experts said they wished Complete College America had considered faculty issues and how much students actually learn.

“They’re too focused on efficiency and not enough on quality,” said Debra Humphreys, a spokeswoman for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “Yes, we have a huge completion problem, but we also have a problem that a lot of students graduated without learning what they need.”

The report did not include statistics from private colleges and universities.