These Guys Take the Damned Cake

Ann Landers once provided her definition of chutzpah in her column. She wrote that chutzpah is the young man pleading for mercy from the court because he is an orphan—when he was
being sentenced for murdering his parents.

That’s kind of what’s been going through my head today after reading an article from Bloomberg News. The headline of the article read “Bonus Withdrawal Puts Bankers in Malaise”. So while you’re reading the rest of this play this song because it really, really fits these guys.



Now I don’t know if the headline was suggesting that bonuses
have been withdrawn or that bankers were suffering withdrawal like an addict
goes through but probably it doesn’t matter.

Over the last few years I’ve gotten kind of numb to the machinations of brokers and investment bankers and the harm they have done to both our economy and our nation. And I’ve avoided taken too much umbrage because it just doesn’t do any good.

I’ve kind of taken an approach like Mister “T” who has long been know for saying “pity the fool”.

But this is just the absolute worst kind of arrogance. Unmitigated gall. Sense of entitlement. Here's a couple of excerpts from the article that really got me spitting and spluttering:

"People who don't have money don't understand the stress," said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. "Could you imagine what it's like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?"

And:

The malaise is shared by Andrew Schiff, the New York-based marketing director for Euro Pacific Capital, where his brother is CEO. His family rents the lower duplex of a brownstone in Cobble Hill, where his two children share a room. His 10-year- old daughter is a student at $32,000-a- ear Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn. His son, 7, will apply in a few years.

"I can't imagine what I'm going to do," Schiff said. "I'm crammed into 1,200 square feet. I don't have a dishwasher. We do all our dishes by hand."

He wants 1,800 square feet -- "a room for each kid, three bedrooms, maybe four," he said. Imagine four bedrooms. You have the luxury of a guest room, how crazy is that?" The family rents a three-bedroom summer house in Connecticut and will go there again this year for one month instead of four. Schiff said he brings home less than $200,000 after taxes, health-insurance and 401(k) contributions.

The closing costs, renovation and down payment on one of the $1.5 million 17-foot-wide row houses nearby, what he called "the low rung on the brownstone ladder," would consume "every dime" of the family's savings, he said.

"I wouldn't want to whine," Schiff said. "All I want is the stuff that I always thought, growing up,
that successful parents had."

Awwwwww, too bad for those poor fellows and their underprivileged children. Having to sacrifice by only renting their summer home for 1 month rather than 4. Having to risk the spectre of their children attending public schools with the “unwashed” and “untouchable”.

Man I feel bad for these guys. Don’t you? They are so obviously struggling just to make ends meet.

And people wonder why there is talk of a risk of class warfare in this nation? And people wonder why so many are angry at the “1%”?


I just leads me to shake my head and mutter to myself, “assholes.”

Stocks Tumble--Will Charlie Brown Kick the Football?

Why is it that all of a sudden I’m feeling just a bit like Charlie Brown getting ready to take another run at kicking the damn football that Lucy is holding with a sadistic leer on her face?

The AP is reporting this noon that stocks are tumbling today (Dow Jones down 165 at noon EDT) because of rising fears by investors about consumer spending.

“While other parts of the economy, including housing and manufacturing, are showing signs of progress, the country cannot have a strong recovery unless consumers are spending more freely. Their spending accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity,” the article said.

The article also touched on investors’ concern that the reluctance of consumers to spend will hurt corporate earnings.

As we used to say when I was in junior high school—“no shit, Sherlock”.

Consumers are reluctant to spend for a couple of basic reasons. One is that they don’t have as much disposable income as they did a couple of years ago. Another is that a lot of us don’t have jobs. Still another is that so many people ended up getting bit in the butt by carrying way too much credit card debt that they have neither the ability nor desire to incur any more.

And yet another one, I think, is that consumers couldn’t give a rat’s behind about corporate earnings—those same corporations which were all too willing to shove dubious finance strategies up our behinds for their own profit and then bemoan their fate when the mortgage market blew up in their faces.

I monitor my SEP IRA balance everyday (if I had been doing that a year ago I’d have a lot more money in it now!) and it has gone up over 20% in the last 4 months. That’s unrealistic. I know it. The Wall Street types know it.

I guess it’s our patriotic duty to go on spending sprees so that the Wall Street types can keep getting their bonuses. Is this cynical? Probably. But with what has been done to consumers in the last year, maybe it's time for a healthy dose of cynicism.