Tidbits
Quotations
To Accompany the November 28, 2012 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/tidbits112812.htm
Bob Jensen
at
Trinity
University
My Free Speech Political Quotations and Commentaries Directory and Log
---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Political/PoliticalQuotationsCommentaries.htm
President Obama is "Rockefeller Republican in
blackface."
Cornell West, Professor of
Philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary at Princeton
University
"Did Obama Let the Left Down?" by Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher
Education, November 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/did-obama-let-the-left-down/31756
Cornell West ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_West
Having sex with your biographer is more fun than
having sex with your autobiographer.
David Petraus (not really)
After the 2012 elections only 10 of the U.S. states have bipartisan control.
The remaining 40have single-party dominance of the executive and legislative
branches.
After the 2012 elections 40 of the 50 states will have single-party control
of both the executive and legislative branches of state government. However,
the degree of control in the legislature varies. Passing legislation is nearly
always more difficult in states with very large legislatures. For example, the
sparsely populated New Hampshire has 400 Representatives, each of whom
represents 3,300 residents on average. The populous State of California has only
80 representatives, each of whom represents nearly 500,000 residents on average.
One of the reasons New Hampshire has no sales or income tax is that it's so
difficult to pass new taxes among 400 Representatives, most of whom represent
anti-tax districts no matter the party affiliation of the Representatives. In
comparison Vermont's 150 Representatives and California's 80
Representatives creatively tax everything under the sun.
"States Choose Own Paths With One-party Governments," by Michael
Barone, Townhall, November 26, 2012 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2012/11/26/states_choose_own_paths_with_oneparty_governments
. . .
Starting next month, Americans in 25 states will
have Republican governors and Republicans in control of both houses of the
state legislatures. They aren't all small states, either. They include about
53 percent of the nation's population.
At the same time, Americans in 15 states will have
Democratic governors and Democrats in control of both houses of the state
legislatures. They include about 37 percent of the nation's population.
. . .
The Republican edge is largely a result of the
Republican trend in 2009 and 2010. Normally, you would expect the Democrats
to recoup and shift the balance the next time they have a good off-year.
Maybe they will in 2014.
But what's striking now is the wide margins in
legislatures for one party or the other in state after state -- most of
them, in fact.
According to the National Conference of State
Legislatures, Republicans will have more than 60 percent of the members of
both legislative houses in 17 states (Nebraska has a single nonpartisan
legislature). And in nine more states, they'll have 60 percent of the
members of one house plus a majority in the other and the governorship.
Democrats will have 60 percent plus of both houses
in 11 states, and in two more they will have 60 percent in one house, a
majority in the other plus the governorship.
This is true even in presidential target states.
The Ohio Senate will be 23-10 Republican, the Florida House 74-46
Republican.
This trend to one-party control seems likely to
have two consequences -- one of interest to political scientists and
pundits, and the other to the larger public.
Pundits and political scientists will start to
identify the chief conflicts being played out not so much in battles between
the two parties -- like the struggle over public employee bargaining in
Wisconsin -- but increasingly within the parties.
Continued in article
Stanford “Election 2012” Course Draws to Close with a Post Portem and
Predictions ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/stanford_concludes_election_2012_course.html
Worth a quick mention:
Stanford’s Election 2012 course (previously
mentioned here) wrapped up with a post-mortem. It
starts with Steve
Schmidt, a former John McCain and George W Bush
advisor, giving a fairly blunt assessment of where the
Republican Party stands right now. (The video above
starts with his assessment.) Then
Tom Steyer, an asset manager, philanthropist and
environmentalist active in Democrat politics, explains
why Obama’s victory is the product of trends (not
necessarily healthy ones) already seen in California
politics for the past decade. And
Simon
Jackman, a Stanford prof immersed in polling, shows
why data matters and
Nate Silver (538 blog) got things right.
The rolling conversation is
moderated by
David Kennedy (Pulitzer Prize-winning historian),
Rob Reich, and
Jim Steyer. We’ve provided YouTube links to the
remaining lectures below. You can also
find them on iTunes. Plus we’ve catalogued
Election 2012 in our collection of 550
Free Online Courses.
Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, videos, tutorials, and course
materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Video: Nobel laureate and Stanford Professor Myron
S. Scholes says some countries are likely to leave the euro so they can become
more competitive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwGHcrjs3iE&utm_source=Stanford+Business+Re%3AThink&utm_campaign=1451d355ee-RTIssue2&utm_medium=email
Myron Scholes is also one of two Nobel laureates brought down by the largest
hedge fund failure in history (what PBS Nova called The Trillion Dollar Bet)
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#LTCM
Jensen Question
Can the same theory apply to having California leave the dollar zone?
Futurity ---
http://www.futurity.org/
Futurity features the latest discoveries by scientists at top research
universities in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. The nonprofit site, which
launched in 2009, is supported solely by its university partners (listed
below) in an effort to share research news directly with the public.
Jensen Comment
This site has considerable liberal bias, especially in the Society and Culture
tab. But this is not entirely bad for readers having an open mind that can
tolerate some of the propositions at this site. For example, an article is
inclined to blame international banks for environmental destruction without
proper recognition that government's authority for saving the ecosystem to the
private sector, but the responsibility still remains with government because of
all the externalities of environmental protection and economic well being ---
http://www.futurity.org/society-culture/big-banks-loom-over-finance-%E2%80%98ecosystem%E2%80%99/
But don't look to any counterbalancing conservatism studies favoring markets
and small government at this site.
"How Free Speech Died on Campus A young activist describes how
universities became the most authoritarian institutions in America," by
Sohab Ahmarik, The Wall Street Journal, November 16m 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323894704578115440209134854.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t&mg=reno-wsj
At Yale University, you can be prevented from
putting an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote on your T-shirt. At Tufts, you can be
censured for quoting certain passages from the Quran. Welcome to the most
authoritarian institution in America: the modern university—"a bizarre,
parallel dimension," as Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education, calls it.
Mr. Lukianoff, a 38-year-old Stanford Law grad, has
spent the past decade fighting free-speech battles on college campuses. The
latest was last week at Fordham University, where President Joseph McShane
scolded College Republicans for the sin of inviting Ann Coulter to speak.
"To say that I am disappointed with the judgment
and maturity of the College Republicans . . . would be a tremendous
understatement," Mr. McShane said in a Nov. 9 statement condemning the
club's invitation to the caustic conservative pundit. He vowed to "hold out
great contempt for anyone who would intentionally inflict pain on another
human being because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed."
To be clear, Mr. McShane didn't block Ms. Coulter's
speech, but he said that her presence would serve as a "test" for Fordham. A
day later, the students disinvited Ms. Coulter. Mr. McShane then praised
them for having taken "responsibility for their decisions" and expressing
"their regrets sincerely and eloquently."
Mr. Lukianoff says that the Fordham-Coulter affair
took campus censorship to a new level: "This was the longest, strongest
condemnation of a speaker that I've ever seen in which a university
president also tried to claim that he was defending freedom of speech."
I caught up with Mr. Lukianoff at New York
University in downtown Manhattan, where he was once targeted by the same
speech restrictions that he has built a career exposing. Six years ago, a
student group at the university invited him to participate in a panel
discussion about the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that had
sparked violent rioting by Muslims across the world.
When Muslim students protested the event, NYU
threatened to close the panel to the public if the offending cartoons were
displayed. The discussion went on—without the cartoons. Instead, the student
hosts displayed a blank easel, registering their own protest.
"The people who believe that colleges and
universities are places where we want less freedom of speech have won," Mr.
Lukianoff says. "If anything, there should be even greater freedom of speech
on college campuses. But now things have been turned around to give campus
communities the expectation that if someone's feelings are hurt by something
that is said, the university will protect that person. As soon as you allow
something as vague as Big Brother protecting your feelings, anything and
everything can be punished."
You might say Greg Lukianoff was born to fight
college censorship. With his unruly red hair and a voice given to booming,
he certainly looks and sounds the part. His ethnically Irish, British-born
mother moved to America during the 1960s British-nanny fad, while his
Russian father came from Yugoslavia to study at the University of Wisconsin.
Russian history, Mr. Lukianoff says, "taught me about the worst things that
can happen with good intentions."
Growing up in an immigrant neighborhood in Danbury,
Conn., sharpened his views. When "you had so many people from so many
different backgrounds, free speech made intuitive sense," Mr. Lukianoff
recalls. "In every genuinely diverse community I've ever lived in, freedom
of speech had to be the rule. . . . I find it deeply ironic that on college
campuses diversity is used as an argument against unbridled freedom of
speech."
After graduating from Stanford, where he
specialized in First Amendment law, he joined the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education, an organization co-founded in 1999 by civil-rights
lawyer Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors, a history professor at the
University of Pennsylvania, to counter the growing but often hidden threats
to free speech in academia. FIRE's tactics include waging publicity
campaigns intended to embarrass college administrators into dropping
speech-related disciplinary charges against individual students, or
reversing speech-restricting policies. When that fails, FIRE often takes its
cases to court, where it tends to prevail.
In his new book, "Unlearning Liberty," Mr.
Lukianoff notes that baby-boom Americans who remember the student protests
of the 1960s tend to assume that U.S. colleges are still some of the freest
places on earth. But that idealized university no longer exists. It was
wiped out in the 1990s by administrators, diversity hustlers and
liability-management professionals, who were often abetted by professors
committed to political agendas.
"What's disappointing and rightfully scorned," Mr.
Lukianoff says, "is that in some cases the very professors who were
benefiting from the free-speech movement turned around to advocate speech
codes and speech zones in the 1980s and '90s."
Today, university bureaucrats suppress debate with
anti-harassment policies that function as de facto speech codes. FIRE
maintains a database of such policies on its website, and Mr. Lukianoff's
book offers an eye-opening sampling. What they share is a view of
"harassment" so broad and so removed from its legal definition that, Mr.
Lukianoff says, "literally every student on campus is already guilty."
At Western Michigan University, it is considered
harassment to hold a "condescending sex-based attitude." That just about
sums up the line "I think of all Harvard men as sissies" (from F. Scott
Fitzgerald's 1920 novel "This Side of Paradise"), a quote that was banned at
Yale when students put it on a T-shirt. Tufts University in Boston
proscribes the holding of "sexist attitudes," and a student newspaper there
was found guilty of harassment in 2007 for printing violent passages from
the Quran and facts about the status of women in Saudi Arabia during the
school's "Islamic Awareness Week."
At California State University in Chico, it was
prohibited until recently to engage in "continual use of generic masculine
terms such as to refer to people of both sexes or references to both men and
women as necessarily heterosexual." Luckily, there is no need to try to
figure out what the school was talking about—the prohibition was removed
earlier this year after FIRE named it as one of its two "Speech Codes of the
Year" in 2011.
At Northeastern University, where I went to law
school, it is a violation of the Internet-usage policy to transmit any
message "which in the sole judgment" of administrators is "annoying."
Conservatives and libertarians are especially
vulnerable to such charges of harassment. Even though Mr. Lukianoff's
efforts might aid those censorship victims, he hardly counts himself as one
of them: He says that he is a lifelong Democrat and a "passionate believer"
in gay marriage and abortion rights. And free speech. "If you're going to
get in trouble for an opinion on campus, it's more likely for a socially
conservative opinion."
Consider the two students at Colorado College who
were punished in 2008 for satirizing a gender-studies newsletter. The
newsletter had included boisterous references to "male castration,"
"feminist porn" and other unprintable matters. The satire, published by the
"Coalition of Some Dudes," tamely discussed "chainsaw etiquette" ("your
chainsaw is not an indoor toy") and offered quotations from Teddy Roosevelt
and menshealth.com. The college found the student satirists guilty of "the
juxtaposition of weaponry and sexuality."
"Even when we win our cases," says Mr. Lukianoff,
"the universities almost never apologize to the students they hurt or the
faculty they drag through the mud." Brandeis University has yet to withdraw
a 2007 finding of racial harassment against Prof. Paul Hindley for
explaining the origins of "wetback" in a Latin-American Studies course.
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis apologized to a janitor
found guilty of harassment—for reading a book celebrating the
defeat of the Ku Klux Klan in the presence of two black colleagues—but only
after protests by FIRE and an op-ed in these pages by
Dorothy Rabinowitz.
What motivates college administrators to act so
viciously? "It's both self-interest and ideological commitment," Mr.
Lukianoff says. On the ideological front, "it's almost like you flip a
switch, and these administrators, who talk so much about treating every
student with dignity and compassion, suddenly come to see one student as a
caricature of societal evil."
Continued in article
Ann Coulter ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Coulter
Michael Moore ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moore
I'm not a huge Ann Coulter fan, and I seriously do not recall ever quoting
her on the AECM or on my Website. However, the article below illustrates another
way progressives on campus in the past are silencing conservative voices on
campus. It's not just that the conservatism speakers that are being silenced,
it's a message to conservative students that they should not be advocating
conservatism.
It's OK to invite Michael Moore but not Ann Coulter.
It's not so much that both Coulter and Moore often violate the principles
of good scholarship. The point is why is Moore so easily invited by liberal
students on campus and Coulter repelled so often by faculty and administration
on college campuses?
"A Different Ann Coulter Debate," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher
Ed, November 12, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/12/fordham-declines-ban-ann-coulter-her-invitation-rescinded
Bob Jensen's threads on liberal biases in the media and academe ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
"Moving Further to the Left," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
October 24, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/24/survey-finds-professors-already-liberal-have-moved-further-left
Academics, on average, lean
to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving
even more in that direction.
Among full-time faculty members at four-year
colleges and universities, the percentage identifying as "far left" or
liberal has increased notably in the last three years, while the percentage
identifying in three other political categories has declined. The data come
from the University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research
Institute, which surveys faculty members nationwide every three years on a
range of attitudes.
Here are the data for the new survey and
the prior survey:
|
2010-11 |
2007-8 |
Far left |
12.4% |
8.8% |
Liberal |
50.3% |
47.0% |
Middle of the road |
25.4% |
28.4% |
Conservative |
11.5% |
15.2% |
Far right |
0.4% |
0.7% |
Gauging how gradual or abrupt this shift is
complicated because of changes in the UCLA survey's methodology; before
2007-8, the survey included community college faculty members, who have been
excluded since. But for those years, examining only four-year college and
university faculty members, the numbers are similar to those of 2007-8.
Going back further, one can see an evolution away from the center.
In the 1998-9 survey, more than 35 percent of
faculty members identified themselves as middle of the road, and less than
half (47.5 percent) identified as liberal or far left. In the new data, 62.7
percent identify as liberal or far left. (Most surveys that have included
community college faculty members have found them to inhabit political space
to the right of faculty members at four-year institutions.)
The new data differ from some recent studies by
groups other than the UCLA center that have found that professors (while
more likely to lean left than right) in fact were
doing so from more of a centrist position.
A major study in 2007, for example, found that
professors were more likely to be centrist than liberal, and that many on
the left identified themselves as "slightly liberal." (That study and the
new one use different scales, making exact comparisons impossible.)
In looking at the new data, there is notable
variation by sector. Private research universities are the most left-leaning,
with 16.2 percent of faculty members identifying as far left, and 0.1
percent as far right. (If one combines far left and liberal, however,
private, four-year, non-religious colleges top private universities, 58.6
percent to 57.7 percent.) The largest conservative contingent can be found
at religious, non-Roman Catholic four-year colleges, where 23.0 percent
identify as conservative and another 0.6 percent say that they are far
right.
Professors' Political Identification,
2010-11, by Sector
|
Far left |
Liberal |
Middle of the Road |
Conservative |
Far right |
Public universities |
13.3% |
52.4% |
24.7% |
9.2% |
0.3% |
Private universities |
16.2% |
51.5% |
22.3% |
9.8% |
0.1% |
Public, 4-year
colleges |
8.8% |
47.1% |
28.7% |
14.7% |
0.7% |
Private, 4-year,
nonsectarian |
14.0% |
54.6% |
22.6% |
8.6% |
0.3% |
Private, 4-year,
Catholic |
7.8% |
48.0% |
30.7% |
13.3% |
0.3% |
Private, 4-year, other
religious |
7.4% |
40.0% |
29.1% |
23.0% |
0.6% |
The study found some differences by gender, with
women further to the left than men. Among women, 12.6 percent identified as
far left and 54.9 percent as liberal. Among men, the figures were 12.2
percent and 47.2 percent, respectively.
When it comes to the three tenure-track ranks,
assistant professors were the most likely to be far left, but full
professors were more likely than others to be liberal.
Professors' Political Identification,
2010-11, by Tenure Rank
|
Far left |
Liberal |
Middle of the Road |
Conservative |
Far right |
Full professors |
11.8% |
54.9% |
23.4% |
9.7% |
0.2% |
Associate professors |
13.8% |
50.4% |
24.0% |
11.5% |
0.4% |
Assistant professors |
13.9% |
48.7% |
25.9% |
11.2% |
0.4% |
So what do these data mean?
Sylvia Hurtado, professor of education at UCLA and
director of the Higher Education Research Institute, said that she didn't
know what to make of the surge to the left by faculty members. She said that
she suspects age may be a factor, as the full-time professoriate is aging,
but said that this is just a theory. Hurtado said that these figures always
attract a lot of attention, but she thinks that the emphasis may be
misplaced because of a series of studies showing no evidence that left-leaning
faculty members are somehow shifting the views of their students or
enforcing any kind of political requirement.
Continued in article
"Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education," by Josh Jones,
Open Culture, November 2012 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/noam_chomsky_spells_out_the_purpose_of_education.html
Bob Jensen's threads on liberal biases in the media and academe ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
Leaning to the Left in the Academy: Generalization to Specialization
Impacts on General Education "Smorgasbord" of Requirements
"Moving Further to the Left," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
October 24, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/24/survey-finds-professors-already-liberal-have-moved-further-left
Academics, on average, lean
to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving
even more in that direction.
Obviously the
pushing out of conservatism varies between instructors, courses, curricula,
and universities, but one of the noteworthy impacts not discussed much is the
replacement of generalized economics courses in the Gen Ed requirements and
elective smorgasbord of seminars in the common core.
Stanford Introductory Seminars ---
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/undergrad/cgi-bin/drupal_ual/sites/default/files/common/docs/sis_IntroSemsCatalog1213.pdf
For example note those Introductory Seminar courses in Economics
- Understanding the Welfare System --- Page 20
- Public Policy and Personal Finance --- Page 32
- Economic Inequality --- Page 77
- Energy, the Environment, and the Economy --- Page 100
There are many other Introductory Seminar courses taught by many departments
on the Stanford Campus. See the course index beginning on --- Page 123 of
the above pdf catalog of Introductory Seminar courses for the 2012/13 academic
year at Stanford University. When scanning all those Introductory Seminar
courses I conclude the following
- The majority of courses are not obviously political at all and hence do
not necessarily lean to the left.
- Among the courses that I would deem partly or entirely political, I
suspect all are hot button topics of liberals such as those dealing with
inequality, welfare, feminism, African American women, African American
social movements, ecology, environmentalism, human rights, race, etc.
My Main Points
Prior to the 1990s, the common curriculum in virtually all universities for the
first two years was mostly comprised of generalized overview courses and
introductory courses to many of the disciplines in which students could choose
to major and/or minor. Since the 1990s most universities are following the leads
of top schools like Harvard and Stanford by replacing many of the generalized
overview courses in the common curriculum with what normally would've been more
specialized advanced courses further down the road in a given major.
The goal of replacing general overview common core courses with a smorgasbord
of specialized and narrowly-focused seminars is generally to stimulate young
minds to think more creatively about enormous societal issues early on and to
get away from traditional "common core" understandings to be shared by virtually
all undergraduates.
But the smorgasbord of choices comes at a price.
The most heavy price is that the common building blocks leading into
intermediate and advanced courses in a major have been pushed further up the
education ladder, thereby forcing those intermediate courses to teach more basic
things and advanced courses to teach more intermediate things.
For example, the following two mathematics Introductory Seminar courses
dramatically illustrate my point:
- Capillary Surfaces: Explored and Unexplored Territory --- Page 85
- Mathematics of Knots, Braids, Links, and Tangles --- Page 85
Having these two discussion math seminars in the first or second year of
college may set the gray cells to thinking, but they are not basic introductory
courses for math, science, or engineering majors who must take math-related
intermediate and advanced courses that follow in their chosen majors. Not all
majors (including math majors) will choose either of these courses from among
the vast smorgasbord of other Introductory Seminar courses. Hence, instructors
of intermediate and advanced courses in any discipline cannot really build upon
these seminars since most of the students in their courses will not have even
had either one of those Introductory Seminars. That's the price of having a
smorgasbord instead of a more rigid menu.
Another price is that it's possible for a graduating seniors to share almost
nothing in common. A few graduates may be experts on Shakespeare while most
others have not learned a single thing about Shakespeare since they were in high
school. A few may be experts on the U.S. Constitution while most others have
never studied one line of the Constitution after four or five years of college.
A few may graduate having studied poetry extensively while most others managed
to graduate from college without having studied a single poem.
Perhaps this is as it should be, but I often wonder whether such Introductory
Seminars are more the product of faculty turf wars as much as curriculum
interests of the students. But I will not speculate further down this avenue.
I also suspect that theories of conservatism are not given a fair shake in
any of Stanford's introductory seminars. But I will not speculate further down
this avenue.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Coal is Still King, Sober Look, November 19, 2012 ---
http://soberlook.com/2012/11/rail-freight-prices-rise-firms-able-to.html
"Banks Need Long-Term Rainy Day Funds: Accounting rules prevent banks from
building loss reserves until shortly before a bad loan is actually written off.
That's just too late," by Eugene A. Ludwig and Paul A. Volcker, The Wall
Street Journal, November 16, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324556304578120721147710286.html?mg=reno64-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Governments around the world are taking bold steps
to minimize the likelihood of another catastrophic financial crisis.
Regulators and financial institutions already have their hands full, so the
bar for adding anything to the agenda should be high.
However, one relatively simple but critically
important item should move to the top of the list: reforming the accounting
rules that inexplicably prevent banks from establishing reasonable loan-loss
reserves. If reserve rules had been written correctly before 2008, banks
could have absorbed bad loans more easily, and the financial crisis probably
would have been less severe. It is now time, before the next crisis, to
recognize that reality.
Loan-loss reserves get far less attention than
capital or liquidity requirements, which are subject to specific government
regulations. Nevertheless, the "Allowance for Loan and Lease Losses" should
be an essential part of assessing the safety and soundness of any bank. The
ALLL—not Tier 1 capital or even cash-on-hand—is the most direct way a bank
recognizes that lending, including necessary and constructive lending,
entails risk. Those risks should be recognized in both accounting and tax
practices as a reasonable cost of the banking business.
However, banks are now only allowed to build their
loan-loss reserves according to strict accounting conventions, enforced by
the Securities and Exchange Commission. Reserves have to be based on losses
that are strictly "incurred," in effect shortly before a bad loan is written
off. Bankers have been prohibited from establishing reserves based on their
own expectations of future losses.
The practical result is that in good times real
earnings are overrated. Conversely, the full impact of loan losses on
earnings and capital is concentrated in times of cyclical strain.
Why have accounting conventions created this
perverse result? Some accountants claim that giving banks flexibility with
their reserves is bad because it lets bankers "manage earnings"—that is, to
raise or lower results from quarter to quarter to look better in investors'
eyes. This is a weak argument, because the ALLL reflects a banking reality,
and the allowance itself is completely transparent.
No one is misled when sufficient disclosures exist.
The size of the bank's reserve cushion will be on the balance sheet, and it
would need to be recognized as reasonable by auditors, supervisors and tax
authorities. Importantly, from a financial policy point of view, reserves
will tend to be countercyclical, likely to discourage aggressive lending
into "bubbles" but helping to absorb losses in times of trouble.
Capital is vital to the safety and soundness of
banks. It is the ultimate and necessary protection against insolvency and
failure. However, permitting a more flexible allowance for loan-loss
reserve, an approach that gives banks and prudential regulators the right to
exercise reasonable discretion to build a more flexible cushion in case of
loss, is a must. Accounting rules need to change to permit this to happen.
Mr. Ludwig, the CEO of Promontory Financial Group, was Comptroller of
the Currency from 1993 to 1998. Mr. Volcker, former chairman of the Federal
Reserve System, is professor emeritus of international economic policy at
Princeton University.
"FASB Will Propose New Credit Impairment Model,"
by Anne Rosivach, AccountingWeb, October 16, 2012 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/fasb-will-propose-new-credit-impairment-model/220047?source=aa
FASB announced
recently that it will separately issue an exposure draft, possibly by
the end of 2012, of a new model for disclosing credit impairment. The
draft of the new approach, which FASB calls the "Current Expected Credit
Loss Model" (CECL Model), may be viewed in
FASB Technical Plan and Project Updates. The
CECL Model applies a single measurement approach for credit impairment.
FASB developed the CECL
Model in response to feedback from US stakeholders on the "three-bucket"
credit impairment approach, previously agreed upon by the FASB and the
IASB. US constituents found the three-bucket approach hard to understand
and suggested it might be difficult to audit.
The IASB continues to
propose the three-bucket approach.
FASB board members agreed
that the CECL Model would apply in all cases where expected credit
losses are based on an expected shortfall in the cash flows that are
specified in a contract, and where the expected credit loss is
discounted using the interest rate in effect after the modification.
This would include troubled debt restructurings. The board has provided
additional guidance.
The Technical Plan explains
the CECL Model as follows:
"At each reporting date, an
entity reflects a credit impairment allowance for its current estimate
of the expected credit losses on financial assets held. The estimate of
expected credit losses is neither a 'worst case' scenario nor a 'best
case' scenario, but rather reflects management's current estimate of the
contractual cash flows that the entity does not expect to collect. . .
.
"Under the CECL Model, the
credit deterioration (or improvement) reflected in the income statement
will include changes in the estimate of expected credit losses resulting
from, but not limited to, changes in the credit risk of assets held by
the entity, changes in historical loss experience for assets like those
held at the reporting date, changes in conditions since the previous
reporting date, and changes in reasonable and supportable forecasts
about the future. As a result, the balance sheet reflects the current
estimate of expected credit losses at the reporting date and the income
statement reflects the effects of credit deterioration (or improvement)
that has taken place during the period."
The FASB has tentatively
decided to require disclosure of the inputs and specific assumptions an
entity factors into its calculations of expected credit loss and a
description of the reasonable and supportable forecasts about the future
that affected their estimate. The entity may be asked to disclose how
the information is developed and utilized in measuring expected credit
losses.
In July, when the FASB
decided to pursue a separate course from the IASB and develop a simpler
Model, the FASB explained the three-bucket approach as follows:
"Previously, the Boards had
agreed on a so-called 'expected loss' approach that would track the
deterioration of the credit risk of loans and other financial assets in
three 'buckets' of severity. Under this Model, organizations would
assign to 'Bucket 1' financial assets that have not yet demonstrated
deterioration in credit quality. 'Bucket 2' and 'Bucket 3' would be
assigned financial assets that have demonstrated significant
deterioration since their acquisition."
FASB states in its
Technical Plan that the key difference between the CECL Model and the
previous three-bucket model is that "under the CECL Model, the basic
estimation objective is consistent from period to period, so there is no
need to describe a 'transfer notion' that determines the measurement
objective in each period."
Bob Jensen's threads on where fair value accounting fails ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#FairValueFails
Bob Jensen's threads on Cookie Jar Accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#CookieJar
"The looming shortfall in public pension costs," by Robert Novy-Marx
and Josh Rauh, The Washington Post, October 10, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-looming-shortfall-in-public-pension-costs/2012/10/19/5b394cdc-0ced-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_story.html?utm_source=Stanford+Business+Re%3AThink&utm_campaign=1451d355ee-RTIssue2&utm_medium=email
How much will the underfunded pension benefits of
government employees cost taxpayers? The answer is usually given in
trillions of dollars, and the implications of such figures are difficult for
most people to comprehend. These calculations also generally reflect only
legacy liabilities — what would be owed if pensions were frozen today. Yet
with each passing day, the problem grows as states fail to set aside
sufficient funds to cover the benefits public employees are earning.
In a recent paper, we bring the problem closer to
home. We studied how much additional money would have to be devoted annually
to state and local pension systems to achieve full funding in 30 years, a
standard period over which governments target fully funded pensions. Or, to
put a finer point on it, we researched: How much will your taxes have to
increase?
Robert Novy-Marx is an assistant professor of finance at the
University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business. Joshua Rauh is
a professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a
senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
"The Revenue Demands of Public Employee Pension Promises," by Robert
Novy-Marx and Joshua D. Rauh, SSRN, September 16, 2012 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/SOL3/PAPERS.CFM?ABSTRACT_ID=1973668
We calculate increases in contributions required to
achieve full funding of state and local pension systems in the U.S. over 30
years. Without policy changes, contributions would have to increase by 2.5
times, reaching 14.1% of the total own-revenue generated by state and local
governments. This represents a tax increase of $1,385 per household per
year, around half of which goes to pay down legacy liabilities while half
funds the cost of new promises. We examine sensitivity to asset return
assumptions, wage correlations, the treatment of workers not currently in
Social Security, and endogenous geographical shifts
Bob Jensen's threads on underfunded pensions and bad accounting rules ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#Pensions
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
Squeezy the Pension Python to the rescue in Illinois?
"Illinois the 'Unfixable' Squeezy the Pension Python to the rescue. Or
not," The Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324556304578123052059258768.html?mg=reno64-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Illinois's pension system is heading for a meltdown
and may now be beyond help. That's the forecast from a Chicago business
group, which told its members last week that the state's pension crisis "has
grown so severe" that it is now "unfixable."
The Commercial Club of Chicago wrote that because
the November elections did not bring in lawmakers willing to push real
reform, the state's roughly $200 billion debt now threatens education,
health care and basic public services. The problem is worsening so fast that
the usual menu of reforms won't be enough to keep public pensions from
sucking taxpayers and whole cities into its yawning maw.
If you think Illinois lawmakers aren't taking the
problems seriously enough, just ask Pat Quinn. On Sunday, the Illinois
Governor kicked off a "grass-roots" effort to rally the state around pension
reform. The Governor hasn't come up with a plan, but don't despair: He
introduced the state's new animated mascot, "Squeezy, the Pension Python,"
and encouraged voters to talk about the problem over Thanksgiving.
Here's some food for thought. The state estimates
its unfunded pension liabilities at around $95 billion. But that rosy
scenario is based on the assumption that pension investments earn some 8% a
year. In fiscal 2012, the Teachers Retirement System had a 0.76% return, the
State Employees Retirement System 0.05%, and the General Assembly Retirement
System a negative 0.14%.
In July, Moody's MCO +0.09% proposed revising how
pension funds calculate their discount rates, with the target for fiscal
2012 at a more realistic 4.1%. Under those assumptions, the gap is even
wider than Illinois acknowledges. Meanwhile, the state's annual pension
liabilities for 2013 are $5.9 billion, up from $1.6 billion a decade ago.
This isn't news to Illinois politicians, who
continue to ignore the coming financial calamity even as the state's bond
rating has fallen to the worst in the nation. State lawmakers may hope they
can delay the train wreck with modest reforms and the kind of tax hikes
Governor Jerry Brown recently foisted on California. Mr. Quinn has said
getting a progressive income tax in the state is "one of my goals before I
stop breathing."
As if he hasn't done enough harm already, but Mr.
Quinn's first goal should be waking up Democratic lawmakers to confront
their union buddies. "While a number of pension reforms have been proposed
in the General Assembly, these are half-measures at best," the Civic Club
continues. "Whether they involve token reductions in cost-of-living
adjustments, locking in billions of dollars of unfunded retiree health care
obligations or other scenarios, these 'reforms' are either insufficient or
stand to make our state's fiscal situation even worse."
Although it is "no longer possible to preserve all
state pension benefits as currently structured," the Civic Club adds, there
are options that would help. The state should immediately end automatic
cost-of-living increases, put a cap on how high a salary can be used to
calculate a pension and raise the retirement age to 67.
The Civic Club tiptoes around it, but any real plan
for the future will also have to include structural changes, including
replacing the defined-benefit plans with the kind of defined-contribution
plans that are typical in the private economy. More likely is that the
politicians keep abdicating and then hit up President Obama for a federal
bailout.
Jensen Comment
Sadly Illinois cannot erase its pension obligations by inflationary printing ("Quantitative
Easing") of its own currency like the United States and Zimbabwe are
now doing to meet financial obligations --- unless Illinois withdraws from the
dollar zone which is unlikely in the near future. Perhaps Illinois will make
future pension promises in Squeezy Pension Python Illinois currency spendable
only within Illinois.
President Obama's political career was launched in Illinois. Before he leaves
office in 2016 he will probably make the ouchie better --- at least for
Illinois.
"The looming shortfall in public pension costs," by Robert Novy-Marx
and Josh Rauh, The Washington Post, October 10, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-looming-shortfall-in-public-pension-costs/2012/10/19/5b394cdc-0ced-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_story.html?utm_source=Stanford+Business+Re%3AThink&utm_campaign=1451d355ee-RTIssue2&utm_medium=email
How much will the underfunded pension benefits of
government employees cost taxpayers? The answer is usually given in
trillions of dollars, and the implications of such figures are difficult for
most people to comprehend. These calculations also generally reflect only
legacy liabilities — what would be owed if pensions were frozen today. Yet
with each passing day, the problem grows as states fail to set aside
sufficient funds to cover the benefits public employees are earning.
In a recent paper, we bring the problem closer to
home. We studied how much additional money would have to be devoted annually
to state and local pension systems to achieve full funding in 30 years, a
standard period over which governments target fully funded pensions. Or, to
put a finer point on it, we researched: How much will your taxes have to
increase?
Robert Novy-Marx is an assistant professor of finance at the
University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business. Joshua Rauh is
a professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a
senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Question
What do the following states sadly share in common?
- Illinois
- Rhode Island
- Connecticut
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Oklahoma
- West Virginia
- New Hampshire (Sigh)
- Alaska
Hint
You know it must be really bad if California did not make the list.
"Nine States with Sinking Pensions," 247 Wall Street, October
18, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://247wallst.com/2012/10/18/nine-states-with-sinking-pensions/?utm_source=247WallStDailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=OCT182012A&utm_campaign=DailyNewsletter
Several years after from the financial crisis of 2008,
state pension funds continue to languish. According to data released this
week by Milliman, Inc. and by the Pew Center on the States, there was a $859
billion gap between the obligations of the country’s 100 largest public
pension plans and the
funding
of these pensions. Most of these are
state funds, and state legislatures have attempted to respond to this
growing crisis by making numerous reforms to try to combat this growing
deficit.In 2010, only Wisconsin’s pension
funds
were fully funded. Nine states,
meanwhile, were 60% funded or less — this would mean that at least 40% of
the amount the state owes current and future retirees is not in the state’s
coffers. In Illinois, just 45% of the state’s pension liabilities were
funded. In some of these states, the gap between the outstanding liability
and the amount funded was in the tens of billions of dollars. California
alone had $113 billion in unfunded liability. Based on Pew’s report, “The
Widening Gap Update,” 24/7 Wall St. identified the nine states with sinking
pensions.
Each year, actuaries determine how much a state
should contribute to its pensions to keep them funded. Many states, for
various reasons, did not pay the full recommended contributions for 2010,
while others have been paying the recommended amount for years. In an
interview with 24/7 Wall St., Milliman Inc. principal and consulting actuary
Becky Sielman explained that despite states making the recommended payments,
many large individual public retirement funds are still underfunded.
Of the nine states with pensions that are
underfunded by 40% or more, three paid more than 90% of the recommended
contributions, and two, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, paid the full
amount. Despite this, pension contributions were still generally higher in
states that were better funded. Of the 16 states that were at least 80%
funded — a level experts consider to be fiscally responsible — 11
contributed at least 97% of the recommended amount.
In an interview with 24/7 Wall St., Pew Center on
the States senior researcher David Draine explained why, despite paying the
full amount, several states continued to be severely underfunded. He pointed
out that meeting contributions was important. He added that states that made
full contributions in 2010 were 84% funded on average, compared to those
that did not, which were only 72% funded.
To explain why several states that are making full
contributions are still underfunded, Draine said much of it has to do with
investment losses. “The 2000s have been a terrible period for pension
investments
that have fallen short of their
expectations … that’s a big part of the growth in the funding gap.”
Unfunded liability can also grow due to overly
optimistic assumptions about
investment
growth, pension payments that become
deferred, and an increase in benefits or an increase in the number of
beneficiaries without a corresponding increase in contributions, Draine
explained.
Based on the Pew Center for the States report, “The
Widening Gap Update,” 24/7 Wall St. identified the nine states with public
pensions that were 60% or less funded as of 2010. From the report, we
considered the total outstanding liability, the total amount funded, and the
proportion of the recommended contribution each state made in 2010. We also
reviewed the level of funding for the 100 largest pension funds in each
state, provided by Milliman’s Public Pension Fund Study, which covered a
period from June 30, 2009, to January 1, 2011.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accountancy and
accountability ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of pension accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#Pensions
Quantitative Easing = Printing Money for the
Money Supply ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
"Is Ben Bernanke Unleashing Inflation?" by Peter Coy, Bloomberg
Business Week, November 21, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-21/is-ben-bernanke-the-new-wizard-of-oz
. . .
“This is a trap,” Goodfriend warned. If the Fed
waits to tighten monetary policy until inflation becomes a concern, it will
be too late, he said: High inflation will become embedded in the economy and
it will take years of punitively high rates to stamp it out.
Continued in article
Many of us agree with Keynesians Paul Krugman and Alan Blinder that there are
some benefits to massive government spending at the start of a severe economic
crash. But the trouble with most Keynesians these days is that they don't know
when to stop. There's now a perpetual excuse that the economy is just too
fragile to stop printing money to pay government's bills. Confiscating the
wealth of the 1% won't make a dent in the weak economy. And hence the money
presses just keep rolling and rolling until one morning you wake up and guess
what? You're in Zimbabwe that is now printing million dollar bills, two of which
it takes to by one chicken egg.
In the media, Peter Schiff is the best-known financial analyst who
publically predicted the economic collapse of 2008 long before it happened,
including his predictions of the bursting of the real estate bubble. He did not,
however, make as many millions on his predictions as several others who quietly
gambled on the crash. Some of those heavily leveraged winnings, however,
might've been due more to luck than the deep analysis of Peter Schiff ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schiff
I might note that "Quantitative Easing" QE1-QE3 in the U.S. is short hand for
when the Fed cranks up printing presses for money so the U.S. Government can pay
its bills without having to either tax or borrow. Sounds like a good idea since
these have been trillions of dollars that do not add to the trillion-dollar
deficit or National Debt or rile taxpayers ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
I might also note that I personally think the government is now lying about
inflation since with a wave of the magic wand it took fuel, food, and other
consumer items out of the calculation of inflation. The current calculation of
inflation is also distorted by the crash in the housing market that does not
reflect the rising costs of materials going into new and rebuilt homes. For
your students, when you want to illustrate how to lie with statistics show them
how inflation is calculated by the government.
"When Infinite Inflation Isn't Enough," by Peter Schiff, Townhall,
November 9, 2012 ---
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/peterschiff/2012/11/08/when_infinite_inflation_isnt_enough
If no one seems to care
that the Titanic is filling with water, why not drill another hole in it?
That seems to be the M.O. of the Bernanke Federal Reserve. After the
announcement of QE3 (also dubbed "QE Infinity") created yet another round of
media chatter about a recovery, the Fed's Open Market Committee has decided
to push infinity a little bit further. The latest move involves the rolling
over of long-term Treasuries purchased as part of Operation Twist, thereby
more than doubling QE3 to a monthly influx of $85 billion in phony money
starting in December. I call it "QE3 Plus" - now with more inflation!
Inflation By Any Other Name
In case you've lost track of all the different ways the Fed has connived to
distort the economy, here's a refresher on Operation Twist: the Fed sells
Treasury notes with maturity dates of three years or less, and uses the cash
to buy long-term Treasury bonds. This "twisting" of its portfolio is
supposed to bring down long-term interest rates to make the US economy
appear stronger and inflation appear lower than is actually the case.
The Fed claims operation twist is inflation-neutral as the size of its
balance sheet remains constant. However, the process continues to send false
signals to market participants, who can now borrow more cheaply to fund
long-term projects for which there is no legitimate support. I said it last
year when Operation Twist was announced, and I'll continue to say it: low
interests rates are part of the problem, not the solution.
Interventions Are Never Neutral
Just as the Fed used its interest-rate-fixing power to make dot-coms and
then housing appear to be viable long-term investments, they are now using
QE3 Plus to conceal the fiscal cliff facing the US government in the near
future.
As the Fed extends the average maturity of its portfolio, it is locking in
the inflation created in the wake of the '08 credit crisis. Back then, we
were promised that the Fed would unwind this new cash infusion when the time
was right. Longer maturities lower the quality and liquidity of the Fed's
balance sheet, making the promised "soft landing" that much harder to
achieve.
The Fed cannot keep
printing indefinitely without consumer prices going wild. In many ways, this
has already begun. Take a look at the gas pump or the cost of a hamburger.
If the Fed ever hopes to control these prices, the day will inevitably come
when the Fed needs to sell its portfolio of long-term bonds. While
short-term paper can be easily sold or even allowed to mature even in tough
economic conditions, long-term bonds will have to be sold at a steep
discount, which will have devastating effects across the yield curve.
It won't be an even trade of slightly lower interest rates now for slightly
higher rates in the future. Meanwhile, in the intervening time, the
government and private sectors will have made a bunch of additional wasteful
spending. When are Bernanke & Co. going to decide is the right time to prove
that the United States is fundamentally insolvent? Clearly this plan lays
down an even stronger incentive to continue suppressing interest rates until
a mega-crisis forces their hands.
Also, when interest rates
rise - the increase made even sharper by the Fed's selling - the Fed will
incur huge losses on its portfolio, which, thanks to a new federal law, will
become a direct obligation of the US Treasury, i.e. you, the taxpayer!
Of course, the Fed refuses
to accept this reality. Even though a painful correction is necessary,
nobody in power wants it to happen while they're in the driver's seat. So
Bernanke will stick with his well-rehearsed lines: the money will flow until
there is "substantial improvement" in unemployment.
Does Bernanke Even Believe It?
Even Bernanke must have a hunch that there isn't going to be any
"substantial improvement" in the near term. I suggested before QE3 was
announced that a new round of stimulus might be Bernanke's way of securing
his job, but recent speculation is that he may step down when his current
term as Fed Chairman expires. Perhaps he is cleverer than I thought. He'll
be leaving a brick on the accelerator of an economy careening towards a
fiscal cliff, and bailing before it goes over the edge. Whoever takes his
place will have to pick up the pieces and accept the blame for the crisis
that Bernanke and his predecessor inflamed.
Don't Gamble Your Savings on Politics
For investors looking to find a safe haven for their money, QE3 Plus is a
strong signal that the price of gold and silver are a long way from their
peaks. Gold hit an eleven-month high at the beginning of October after the
announcement of QE3, but the response to the Fed's latest meeting was
lackluster. When the Fed officially announces its commitment to QE3 Plus in
December, I wouldn't be surprised to see a much bigger rally. For that
matter, many are keeping an eye on the election outcome before making a move
on precious metals.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Many of us agree with Keynesians Paul Krugman and Alan Blinder that there are
some benefits to massive government spending at the start of a severe economic
crash. But the trouble with most Keynesians these days is that they don't know
when to stop. There's now a perpetual excuse that the economy is just too
fragile to stop printing money to pay government's bills. Confiscating the
wealth of the 1% won't make a dent in the weak economy. And hence the money
presses just keep rolling and rolling until one morning you wake up and guess
what? You're in Zimbabwe that is now printing million dollar bills, two of which
it takes to by one chicken egg.
From the CFO Journal on November 19, 2012
Ex-bosses reap big consulting fees.
Former executives often land lucrative consulting gigs at their old
companies, writes
the Journal’s Joann S. Lublin. Boards dole them
out to smooth transitions and stop ex-bosses from joining rivals or poaching
staff. But Brandon Rees, head of the AFL-CIO’s Office of Investment, says
consulting agreements often are a hidden substitute for severance pay.” And
they don’t always work out for executives. A CBS finance
chief, Fredric G. Reynolds, assisted his longtime employer for a while after
he left, but there wasn’t that much to do and he “couldn’t justify”
continuing, so he asked CBS to halt payments. Reynolds says boards should be
more skeptical of consulting agreements. “It’s a way to get people to move
on … But it doesn’t wind up being very productive.”
"Lucrative
Consulting Fees Reach Bigger Set," by Hoann S. Lublin, The Wall Street
Journal, November 19, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324073504578115163336933032.html?mod=ITP_marketplace_0&mg=reno64-wsj
When Samuel J. Palmisano retires next month, he'll
enjoy a generous goodbye present: The former International Business Machines
Corp. IBM +1.82% chief will earn $20,000 for any day he spends four hours
advising his longtime employer.
That means hypothetically he could pocket $400,000
a year for 20 half-days of work—twice what his predecessor, Louis V.
Gerstner Jr., makes per day under a similar consulting arrangement. Mr.
Palmisano's contract is open-ended and doesn't specify the number of days he
will work. Mr. Gerstner's 10-year consulting contract expires in March.
Many former executives enjoy lucrative consulting
gigs at their old companies. Boards dole out these agreements to guarantee
smooth leadership transitions and prevent former bosses from joining a
rival, poaching staffers or filing suit against the company.
Companies have paid key former executives as
consultants since at least the 1970s, and the practice gained acceptance
because boards wanted continued access to those ex-officials' knowledge,
according to several executive-pay attorneys.
In some cases, the deals are so generous that they
go beyond the grave—such as the consulting accord for Phillip "Rick" Powell,
who stepped down as CEO of First Cash Financial Services Inc. FCFS +5.17% in
2005.
Under Mr. Powell's consulting contract, the
operator of pawn shops and check-cashing stores was required to pay $3.5
million in consulting fees if Mr. Powell had died during 2011, the company's
latest proxy said. (The 62-year-old Mr. Powell, who has been fighting U.S.
charges of illegal insider trading since last year, remains alive and well.)
The controversial perquisite bothers some activist
investors, especially because these deals are sometimes made when a company
is nudging an executive out the door.
"Consulting agreements often are a hidden
substitute for severance pay," says Brandon Rees, head of the AFL-CIO's
Office of Investment. "Their questionable value will influence how
shareholders vote on executive pay in the 2013 proxy season."
Consulting arrangements have fallen in popularity
among CEOs over the past decade, but are gaining traction for other
departing C-suite leaders, according to analyses for The Wall Street
Journal.
In the five years ended Aug. 1, 16 former leaders
of the nation's 1,000 biggest concerns took home at least $500,000 in
consulting fees, concludes Equilar Inc., a pay-research firm. That compares
with 28 retired chiefs making that much between 1996 and 2001, a previous
WSJ study found.
Yet "there's a general upward trend" since 2007 in
the number of consulting contracts for other senior executives, such as
finance chiefs or general counsel, reports Theo Francis, an independent
compensation researcher. He reviewed nearly 300 such agreements for the
Journal.
Just a tiny fraction require a minimum workload—7
of 174 recently disclosed executive consulting agreements, according to a
separate study by Mr. Francis. (Mr. Francis is a former Journal reporter who
left the paper in 2008.)
Kimberly-Clark Corp. KMB +1.14% guarantees Jan B.C.
Spencer $50,000 per quarter through mid-2014 for consulting services—and a
maximum of 200 hours a year, according to a regulatory filing. The senior
vice president retired in June at age 57 after more than three decades with
the company, and says he chose to limit his hours because he didn't want an
"onerous" obligation.
He estimates he spent nearly 50 hours counseling
former colleagues this summer, such as helping a European team with
planning.
Smooth transitions are a big part of the plan.
Advice from a predecessor proved useful during James D. Wehr's initial
months as chief executive of insurer Phoenix Cos. PNX +3.92% Dona D. Young,
his predecessor, received $300,000 for six months of consulting after she
retired in 2009.
"Dona helped me transition into my new role and
expand my relationships inside and outside the company,'' Mr. Wehr recalled.
Thomas Johnson, Phoenix's board chairman, said Mrs. Young was especially
useful in the initial months, and coached Mr. Wehr about promoting a rising
star whom she had been grooming while CEO. Mrs. Young declined to comment.
It doesn't always work out, though. In early 2008,
Acxiom Corp. ACXM +1.27% promised to pay departing Chief Executive Charles
Morgan $500,000 annually for up to three years of consulting. Mr. Morgan
agreed to help his successor, John Meyer, strengthen the company's customer
ties and advise on technology strategy, according to his consulting accord.
But less than two months later, management stopped using Mr. Morgan's
services. An Acxiom spokeswoman declines to say why. Per his accord, Mr.
Morgan still collected $1.5 million. He didn't return calls seeking comment.
At Boeing Co., BA +1.65% Scott Carson retired in
January 2010 after running its commercial airplanes unit. He earned about
$1.5 million for advising Boeing no more than 75 hours a month. The two-year
contract expired last March.
Mr. Carson's replacement, Jim Albaugh, "had
relatively limited experience with our commercial customers," and so the
former executive "provided continuity," a company spokesman says.
Mr. Carson says he attended aircraft-delivery
events and accompanied colleagues to complete sales, including one in
Ethiopia. But he never consulted the maximum amount per month, the retired
executive says. And "in the last six months, it was nothing"—even though he
received his full fee.
The transition "ended up being a bit shorter than
we estimated," the Boeing spokesman explains.
Mr. Carson now chairs the board of regents for
Washington State University, among other things.
A CBS Corp. CBS +2.65% finance chief who won a
post-retirement consulting gig took an unusual approach after he no longer
felt needed. Fredric G. Reynolds was due $100,000 a month for three months
after leaving the media concern in August 2009, followed by $60,000 a month
through August 2010.
Mr. Reynolds says he assisted his longtime employer
with U.K. outdoor billboard deals, among other things. By early 2010,
however, he stopped being busy for CBS, he recalls. "I couldn't justify
doing this [consulting] through August," he says.
CBS accepted Mr. Reynolds's request, halting
payments in late February, a spokesman says.
Former executives rarely cut short their consulting
gigs, however.
Mr. Reynolds says boards should be more skeptical
of such arrangements. "It's a way to get people to move on," he notes. "But
it doesn't wind up being very productive."
Continued in article
Bonuses for What?
The only guy to make almost a $100 Million dollars at GE is the CEO who
destroyed shareholder value by nearly 50% in slightly less than a decade
"GE has been an investor disaster under Jeff Immelt," MarketWatch,
March 8, 2010 ---
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ge-has-been-an-investor-disaster-under-jeff-immelt-2010-03-08
When things go well,
chief executives of major companies rack up hundreds of millions of dollars,
even billions, on their stock allotments and options.
It's always justified
on the grounds that they've created lots of shareholder value. But what
happens when things go badly?
For one example, take
a look at General Electric Co. /quotes/comstock/13*!ge/quotes/nls/ge (GE
16.27, +0.04, +0.22%) , one of America's biggest and most important
companies. It just revealed its latest annual glimpse inside the executive
swag bag.
By any measure of
shareholder value, GE has been a disaster under Jeffrey Immelt. Investors
haven't made a nickel since he took the helm as chairman and chief executive
nine years ago. In fact, they've lost tens of billions of dollars.
The stock, which was
$40 and change when Immelt took over, has collapsed to around $16. Even if
you include dividends, investors are still down about 40%. In real
post-inflation terms, stockholders have lost about half their money.
So it may come as a
shock to discover that during that same period, the 54-year old chief
executive has racked up around $90 million in salary, cash and pension
benefits.
GE is quick to point
out that Immelt skipped his $5.8 million cash bonus in 2009 for the second
year in a row, because business did so badly. And so he did.
Yet this apparent
sacrifice has to viewed in context. Immelt still took home a "base salary"
of $3.3 million and a total compensation of $9.9 million.
His compensation in
the previous two years was $14.3 million and $9.3 million. That included
everything from salary to stock awards, pension benefits and other perks.
Too often, the media
just look at each year's pay in isolation. I decided to go back and take the
longer view.
Since succeeding Jack
Welch in 2001, Immelt has been paid a total of $28.2 million in salary and
another $28.6 million in cash bonuses, for total payments of $56.8 million.
That's over nine years, and in addition to all his stock- and option-grant
entitlements.
It doesn't end there.
Along with all his cash payments, Immelt also has accumulated a remarkable
pension fund worth $32 million. That would be enough to provide, say, a
60-year-old retiree with a lifetime income of $192,000 a month.
Yes, Jeff Immelt has
been at the company for 27 years, and some of this pension was accumulated
in his early years rising up the ladder. But this isn't just his regular
company pension. Nearly all of this is in the high-hat plan that's only
available to senior GE executives.
Immelt's personal use
of company jets -- I repeat, his personal use for vacations, weekend
getaways and so on -- cost GE stockholders another $201,335 last year. (It's
something shareholders can think about when they stand in line to take off
their shoes at JFK -- if they're not lining up at the Port Authority for a
bus.)
Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous compensation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation
"Why a Low Carbon Price Can Be Good News for the Climate," by Eric
Pooley, Harvard Business Review Blog, November 21, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/11/why_a_low_carbon_price_is_good.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Coal is Still King
Healthcare Video and Cases From PwC
Why mobile technology may well define the future of healthcare... for
everyone. ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qkm_7XUDqIY
PwC mHealth (read that Mobile Health) Master Site ---
http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/healthcare/mhealth/index.jhtml?WT.ac=vt-mhealth#&panel1-1
Mobile is
accelerating trends in healthcare
Three major trends already
happening in healthcare lend themselves to the revolution in mobile
technology:
Ageing population
Ageing populations and
chronic illness are driving regulatory reform. Public sector healthcare
is seeking better access and quality, and it's looking to the private
sector for innovation and efficiency. mHealth improves access and
quality, and offers dramatic innovation and cost reduction.
Foundations already in
place
The foundations of
industrialisation of healthcare are already in place — electronic
medical records, remote monitoring and communications. ‘Care anywhere’
is already emerging. The platform for mHealth is set.
Personalisation
Healthcare, like other
industries, is getting personal. mHealth can offer personal toolkits for
predictive, participatory and preventative care.
"An Overview of the Affordable Care Act," by Matt Kukla, Scribed,
November 2012 ---
http://www.scribd.com/doc/109391737/An-Overview-of-the-ACA
As you know, health care has been a highly
politicized topic in recent years and become a focal point of theupcoming
elections. Solving our health care crisis is crucial to the survival,
productivity and well being of boththe U.S. economy and all its citizens.
Fortunately, there exists a growing body of evidence from across theworld
offering solutions for fixing our health system – evidence that bridges and
blends the best of bothpolitical parties for those open minded enough to see
it. Yet it is stuck behind the curtain of drama andpartisanship, and I fear
the ongoing political theatre will prevent us from utilizing this body of
knowledge.I recently finished my PhD in Health Systems Financing, Economics
and Policy and returned from working atthe World Health Organization in
Geneva. While my background focuses on the U.S. health care system, mostof
my work involves reforming health systems in other developed and developing
countries. I essentially dealwith (a) how institutional frameworks,
governance, and political systems impact health care and (b) howhealth care
dollars are collected, pooled, and redistributed / paid among the big three
(insurance, individualsand medical providers). Because this is the primary
goal of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and given thetremendous amount
of misinformation circulating about these issues, I have writtena summary of
(a) whatour existing health care system looks like, notably the root causes
of rising costs and the uninsured, (b) thetrue content of the Affordable
Care Act, (c) what the ACA should have done differently, and (d)
someadditional insights into our health care system that you might find
prevalent and interesting.I realize that terms like “Evidence” and “Facts”
are thrown around so frequently in American society,individuals rarely know
which are truly accurate and non-biased. Political parties, special interest
groups, andmany Americans are also willing to utilize sound research when it
supports their arguments but are keen todebunk it as biased when it does
not. As such, I want to ensure your confidence that this write-up is
accurateand non-biased. My data comes from my own work and a range of
sources including the World Bank, WorldHealth Organization, top academic
literature, and the best non-partisan policy think tanks (RAND,Commonwealth
Fund, Health Affairs, Kaiser). I have also been critical of many liberal and
conservative "talkingpoints" as well as the ACA, while providing the most
updated evidence where possible. If you have any questions about these
sources or wish to read them, please don’t hesitate to email me.
The Problem Interestingly, the U.S. health care
system is not actually a system, but something that has been put
togetherpiecemeal over decades of policymaking. Our political system is
built for incremental policymaking at best;thus health care reforms have
built on one another only to fill in any existing gaps. Yet we have never
steppedback, looked at the big picture and restructured the entire system to
be coordinated, efficient or effective. It'slike continuing to put band-aids
on a gushing wound, when what's needed is surgery. Or it's like having
40workers operate an assembly line that's meant for 15 people -- instead of
removing them and simplifying, weadd more people to manage those 40. The
system becomes increasingly layered, inefficient, ineffective,complex and
stagnant. The following is a brief overview of what our existing health care
system looks like as aresult of this reform process. While there is no
silver bullet or single change that will fix our health care system(despite
what people tell you), overwhelming evidence from dozens of developed
countries and the USsuggests that the following factors account for a
significant portion of the growth in our healthcare costs (18percent of GDP
vs. 8-13 percent in most other developed countries) and lack of health care
coverage (19percent of the population / 49 million vs. 1-2 percent in other
countries
Continued in article
Healthcare Video and Cases From PwC
Why mobile technology may well define the future of healthcare... for
everyone. ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qkm_7XUDqIY
PwC mHealth (read that Mobile Health) Master Site ---
http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/healthcare/mhealth/index.jhtml?WT.ac=vt-mhealth#&panel1-1
Mobile is
accelerating trends in healthcare
Three major trends already
happening in healthcare lend themselves to the revolution in mobile
technology:
Ageing population
Ageing populations and
chronic illness are driving regulatory reform. Public sector healthcare
is seeking better access and quality, and it's looking to the private
sector for innovation and efficiency. mHealth improves access and
quality, and offers dramatic innovation and cost reduction.
Foundations already in
place
The foundations of
industrialisation of healthcare are already in place — electronic
medical records, remote monitoring and communications. ‘Care anywhere’
is already emerging. The platform for mHealth is set.
Personalisation
Healthcare, like other
industries, is getting personal. mHealth can offer personal toolkits for
predictive, participatory and preventative care.
The booked National
Debt in August 2012 went over $16 trillion ---
U.S. National Debt Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Also see
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Question
How does the U.S. government hide its true debt total?
Answer
Firstly, there are $100-$200 trillion in unbooked entitlements. Nobody has an
accurate estimate of those future obligations, especially for the Medicare
gorilla.
The U.S. currently has "booked" National Debt slightly over $16 trillion that
is a more accurate estimate of the debt coming due soon?
Or is this an accurate number by any stretch of the imagination?
"Why $16 Trillion Only Hints at the True U.S. Debt: Hiding the
government's liabilities from the public makes it seem that we can tax our way
out of mounting deficits. We can't," by Chris Cox (former SEC Director) and
Bill Archer (PwC), The Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323353204578127374039087636.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t&mg=reno64-wsj
A decade and a half ago, both of us served on
President Clinton's Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, the
forerunner to President Obama's recent National Commission on Fiscal
Responsibility and Reform. In 1994 we predicted that, unless something was
done to control runaway entitlement spending, Medicare and Social Security
would eventually go bankrupt or confront severe benefit cuts.
Eighteen years later, nothing has been done. Why?
The usual reason is that entitlement reform is the third rail of American
politics. That explanation presupposes voter demand for entitlements at any
cost, even if it means bankrupting the nation.
A better explanation is that the full extent of the
problem has remained hidden from policy makers and the public because of
less than transparent government financial statements. How else could
responsible officials claim that Medicare and Social Security have the
resources they need to fulfill their commitments for years to come?
As Washington wrestles with the roughly $600
billion "fiscal cliff" and the 2013 budget, the far greater fiscal challenge
of the U.S. government's unfunded pension and health-care liabilities
remains offstage. The truly important figures would appear on the federal
balance sheet—if the government prepared an accurate one.
But it hasn't. For years, the government has gotten
by without having to produce the kind of financial statements that are
required of most significant for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. The U.S.
Treasury "balance sheet" does list liabilities such as Treasury debt issued
to the public, federal employee pensions, and post-retirement health
benefits. But it does not include the unfunded liabilities of Medicare,
Social Security and other outsized and very real obligations.
As a result, fiscal policy discussions generally
focus on current-year budget deficits, the accumulated national debt, and
the relationships between these two items and gross domestic product. We
most often hear about the alarming $15.96 trillion national debt (more than
100% of GDP), and the 2012 budget deficit of $1.1 trillion (6.97% of GDP).
As dangerous as those numbers are, they do not begin to tell the story of
the federal government's true liabilities.
The actual liabilities of the federal
government—including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees'
future retirement benefits—already exceed $86.8 trillion, or 550% of GDP.
For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare
and Social Security was $7 trillion. Nothing like that figure is used in
calculating the deficit. In reality, the reported budget deficit is less
than one-fifth of the more accurate figure.
Why haven't Americans heard about the titanic $86.8
trillion liability from these programs? One reason: The actual figures do
not appear in black and white on any balance sheet. But it is possible to
discover them. Included in the annual Medicare Trustees' report are separate
actuarial estimates of the unfunded liability for Medicare Part A (the
hospital portion), Part B (medical insurance) and Part D (prescription drug
coverage).
As of the most recent Trustees' report in April,
the net present value of the unfunded liability of Medicare was $42.8
trillion. The comparable balance sheet liability for Social Security is
$20.5 trillion.
Were American policy makers to have the benefit of
transparent financial statements prepared the way public companies must
report their pension liabilities, they would see clearly the magnitude of
the future borrowing that these liabilities imply. Borrowing on this scale
could eclipse the capacity of global capital markets—and bankrupt not only
the programs themselves but the entire federal government.
These real-world impacts will be felt when
currently unfunded liabilities need to be paid. In theory, the Medicare and
Social Security trust funds have at least some money to pay a portion of the
bills that are coming due. In actuality, the cupboard is bare: 100% of the
payroll taxes for these programs were spent in the same year they were
collected.
In exchange for the payroll taxes that aren't paid
out in benefits to current retirees in any given year, the trust funds got
nonmarketable Treasury debt. Now, as the baby boomers' promised benefits
swamp the payroll-tax collections from today's workers, the government has
to swap the trust funds' nonmarketable securities for marketable Treasury
debt. The Treasury will then have to sell not only this debt, but far more,
in order to pay the benefits as they come due.
When combined with funding the general cash
deficits, these multitrillion-dollar Treasury operations will dominate the
capital markets in the years ahead, particularly given China's de-emphasis
of new investment in U.S. Treasurys in favor of increasing foreign direct
investment, and Japan's and Europe's own sovereign-debt challenges.
When the accrued expenses of the government's
entitlement programs are counted, it becomes clear that to collect enough
tax revenue just to avoid going deeper into debt would require over $8
trillion in tax collections annually. That is the total of the average
annual accrued liabilities of just the two largest entitlement programs,
plus the annual cash deficit.
Nothing like that $8 trillion amount is available
for the IRS to target. According to the most recent tax data, all
individuals filing tax returns in America and earning more than $66,193 per
year have a total adjusted gross income of $5.1 trillion. In 2006, when
corporate taxable income peaked before the recession, all corporations in
the U.S. had total income for tax purposes of $1.6 trillion. That comes to
$6.7 trillion available to tax from these individuals and corporations under
existing tax laws.
In short, if the government confiscated the entire
adjusted gross income of these American taxpayers, plus all of the corporate
taxable income in the year before the recession, it wouldn't be nearly
enough to fund the over $8 trillion per year in the growth of U.S.
liabilities. Some public officials and pundits claim we can dig our way out
through tax increases on upper-income earners, or even all taxpayers. In
reality, that would amount to bailing out the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon.
Only by addressing these unsustainable spending commitments can the nation's
debt and deficit problems be solved.
Neither the public nor policy makers will be able
to fully understand and deal with these issues unless the government
publishes financial statements that present the government's largest
financial liabilities in accordance with well-established norms in the
private sector. When the new Congress convenes in January, making the
numbers clear—and establishing policies that finally address them before it
is too late—should be a top order of business.
Mr. Cox, a former chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee
and the Securities and Exchange Commission, is president of Bingham
Consulting LLC. Mr. Archer, a former chairman of the House Ways & Means
Committee, is a senior policy adviser at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
Jensen Comment
Let's forget about this debt and entitlement nonsense.
President Obama should appoint Nobel Laureate Professor Paul Krugman as his only
economic advisor and print all the money we owe without having to worry about
taxes and spending and cliffs. It's called Quantitative Easing but by any other
name it's just printing greenbacks to scatter over the money supply ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
Not because we will need the money, but let's also confiscate the wealth of the
top 25% as punishment for their abuses of the tax and regulation laws. Greed is
a bad thing, and they need to be knocked to ground level because of their greed.
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accounting (it's all
done with smoke and mirrors) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
Bob Jensen's threads on entitlements ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Whether or not you love or hate the scholarship and media presentations of
the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman, I think you have to appreciate his
articulate response on this historic Phil Donohue Show episode. Many of the
current dire warnings about entitlements were predicted by him as one of the
cornerstones in his 1970's PBS Series on "Free to Choose." We just didn't listen
as we poured on unbooked national debt (over $100 trillion and not
counting) for future generations to deal with rather than pay as we went so to
speak! .
The Grand Old Scholar/Researcher on the subject of greed in economics
Video: Milton Friedman answers Phil Donohue's questions about
capitalism.---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/MiltonFriedmanGreed.wmv
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Adding Pain to Misery in Medicare Funding of the Future
"The Dementia Plague: As the world's population of older people rapidly
grows in the coming years, Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia will become a
health-care disaster," by Stephen S. Hall, MIT's Technology Review, October
5, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/429494/the-dementia-plague/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121005
Bob
Jensen's universal health care messaging ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Bob
Jensen's universal health care messaging ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Bob Jensen's
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbitsdirectory.htm
Bob
Jensen's Pictures and Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
Summary of Major Accounting Scandals ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_scandals
Bob Jensen's threads on such scandals:
Bob Jensen's threads on audit firm litigation and negligence ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm
Current and past editions of my
newsletter called Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Enron ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm
Rotten to the Core ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
American History of Fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudAmericanHistory.htm
Bob Jensen's fraud
conclusions ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on
auditor professionalism and independence are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001c.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on
corporate governance are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Governance
Shielding
Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
·
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
·
With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors Jagdish
Gangolly and Paul Williams
·
With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of Accountancy
Ignores TAR
·
With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research into
Undergraduate Accounting Courses
Shielding
Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
By Bob Jensen
What went
wrong in accounting/accountics research? ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most
Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW:
1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and Statistics
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the vegetable nutrition paradox)
that probably will never be solved
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
Bob
Jensen's economic crisis messaging
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Bob
Jensen's threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob
Jensen's Home Page ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/