Great line as the clip closes. Yep...the Administration wants "To Serve Man"...
(Sorry for the Damon Knight/Twilight Zone spoiler, but it's nearly 60 years old. :-)
Posted on 10/23/2009 7:46:45 AM PDT by Biggirl
Neil Cavuto and Bill O'Reilly in a cat fight over executive pay. Conficto gato or cat fight in Spanish.
Too much. Neil Cavuto from FBN (which if you do not have ….DEMAND IT … tried desperately to explain to Bill O’Reilly, why controlling the pay of even those companies taking bailout money, is just a bad idea. It’s a slippery slope. O’Reilly, at his populist best, scoffs. But there is a turning point about midway through. The money line … Bill, there is no free market. Watch all the way through and he will convince you too.
(Excerpt) Read more at radioviceonline.com ...
I watched part of this - Cavuto let BOR have it right between the eyes - unfortunately BOR is too arrogant to actually have noticed he got schooled.
I am not in support of limiting the pay of any company in the free market. But I could care less whether these wallstreet firms that were bailed out get hammered. In fact, for the good of those firms that made wise decisions and did things right, the TARP firms should get hammered.
He looked like a deer in the headlights at the end of the interview.
But that is water under the bridge. Going forward the rule should be that if ANY company is to big to fail, then it should be broken up into smaller companies using antitrust laws. No company in any industry should be allowed to be so big that the government HAS to bail it out if it starts to fail.
I think he was in shock that Cavuto would dare question him.
Great line as the clip closes. Yep...the Administration wants "To Serve Man"...
(Sorry for the Damon Knight/Twilight Zone spoiler, but it's nearly 60 years old. :-)
Let me guess...you didn’t watch the clip before posting...
BOR's a control freak regardless of political bent. And I don't think he's a true conservative either. He's kinda bend-with-the-wind which he prefers to call Traditional.
Maybe where he's from it is.
I couldn’t believe Charles Krauthammer thought it was OK too. He said that last night on Fox News Special Report.
Classic line, I was going to comment on that too.
O’Reilly is very clever but he is not smart. Watching the exchange it was painfully obvious that BOR did not understand the full raminfications or end game. Like Cavuto was playing chess and BOR was playing checkers. Cavuto said that slashing the pay impedes a free market system; other firms that were not bailed out have no incentive to keep paying high salaries. They can lower their pay, because there is no fear that the employee will make more at the bailed out firm.
Cavuto said it’s a slippery slope. First its the Wall Street and Car companies, then who knows? I wonder what O’Reilly would say if Obama bailed out GE/ NBC and slashed their compensation. He would be getting a call from Murdoch that his contract is going to be rewritten.
An additional point here...companies like Ford could conceivably be taken private and turned into partnerships wherein the execs and management are only paid draws against the partnership interest which varies according to performance (like law firms or accounting firms).
This would put the comp issue beyond the reach of the government unless the gov't decides to go after lawyers and partnership comp as well, and that compounds the problem considerably.
You can't limit the growth of wealth in a partnership that owns equity because to do so the gov't would essentially be saying to the partnership and the equities (companies) it owns that there is a fixed limit to their success (i.e. a company can only grow so much, or so fast, or succeed but just a certain percentage each year).
Such a limit on success, difficult as it would be to enforce, would kill the American economy...and we would all have to move to another country to earn a living OR join the underground economy that would spring up as it did in all communist countries.
A little bit shocking, but the real crime was when they government bailed them out and essentially became their owner. Once they consented to government ownership, setting salaries is pretty much expected.
Bingo. ;0)
No one can "school" the closet fascist, O'Reilly. His is the final word, the final decision, the final answer, the final solution.
He made my blood boil again last night with his sly remarks and innuendos. After playing the clip of Vice-President Cheney's refutation of Obama's Afghanistan lies and distortions, O'Reilly was right there starting off with the remark...."now if what Cheney is saying is true....."
I about threw a shoe into my TV set. But BOR is full of these sly little bon mots, mostly against conservatism. Start paying closer attention to all his little asides and "final words" which close a topic and are not subject to refutation or correction by a guest.
....and hold on to your shoes.
Leni
P.S....see my tag line and be informed about this man.
The extreme result could be that anyone who has some some of tax subsidy (mortgage interest deduction, claiming dependents, student loans, etc.) would be an excuse to control your income. If you think that's far-fetched, who could have imagined 10 years ago thing that have happened in the last 9 months?
That's specious reasoning and just doesn't hold water.
BOR wants to land an interview with BObama so bad he won’t open his eyes/ears to see or listen to others on subject.
BOR wants everyone to agree to his point of view.
JMO, still have that in USA.
Hey Karly-poo, should we limit the pay of the bloviators at MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NPR, NBC, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and George Soros?
I think his point was that non-TARP execs would be punished because their salaries could be depressed because the market for those jobs is being influenced by government fiat. He sees this as a way of the govt depressing incomes of those who were not part of the TARP situation in the first place. It is a way for govt to decrease the compensation of high earners, those people so despised by liberals and class-envy enthusiasts. He is correct.
I dont disagree with points 1 and 2. I do think that you might be a little off on point 3. Once the government gets their nose under the tent, they will get greedy and they will be jealous.
This action will get the “workers of the world” all riled up—in fact, this will get all workers looking at the pay of their managers and executives. Most average worker-bees have no idea what the top folk make. I know from experience that Senior VPs in the run of the mill financial institution make eight to ten times that of their front line employee. Bonuses of 60-80% were not uncommon. I was actually a little unsettled when I found out the pay scales.
The government wont HAVE to do anything, there will be a movement towards more organization and unions will see a revival.
THAT is the agenda here.
Cavuto makes a *lot* of people look both ignorant and mean.
I like Neil.
O’Reilly is just a boob when he gets on these populist rants. His thing about the oil-companies and gas prices in 2008 was ridiculous.
Nope. Just O'Reilly. He's Fox's Chief Bloviator. (The original post was sarcasm, even though I wouldn't mind seeing O'Reilly hoist on his on petard).
Nam Vet
First, I was responding to Cavuto's point that the restriction of TARP recipient comp would spread throughout the economy WITHOUT addition regulation and restrictions.
I agree with you in that their initial move to restrict pay is a harbinger of their desire to legally restrict ALL business.
As I said, such restrictions would eventually have to be placed not just on partnership performance but even on the actually growth of companies...and it is hard, but not impossible, to see how they would tell companies to limit their sales to a certain level.
If they implement that level of control, they will have killed the golden goose.
There are two issues here: The government setting salaries for those companies that have accepted and have not repaid TARP funds and setting compensation for those who have either not accepted or repaid. Banks routinely place restrictions on compensation and payment of dividends by the borrower until the loan is repaid. This is just prudent lending. As long as the government is the lender, it too should do so. If the government has been repaid or never lent, it should keep its nose out of the matter. This latter right recently proposed by the FED scares the me.
Isn’t the issue of crazy executive salaries stemming from the salaries being set in many cases by a board of directors that consists of...... executives? Maybe of other companies though?
IMHO, one major problem with the corporate world is that the executives are operating on a ‘get-in’ make $$ ‘get-out’ mentality that is not punished by bad results, and is usually very shortsighted. Its an ethics/morality kind of thing that the government cannot regulate.
The larger a corporate entity is, the more insulation the execs have fron Joe stockholder and Josephine consumer. Until a better, cheaper option comes to the market.
What about some of the firms and small banks forced to take TARP so they could lend it to the banks? What happens when their pay gets limited, and they had no choice?
My secretary were paid extremely well compared to others in NYC. In fact, in most years I paid her a bonus equal to her salary. The support staff, mostly young MBA's, were also paid handsomely out of the fees I generated, but their comp was decided by the Department Head with input from me
But as you can see, as a senior investment banker, my pay (except for a small salary) was almost all bonus. It was big but the pressure was intense.
Wall St firms compete with each other (i.e. the investment bankers at my firm competed with those at other for the same deals) and the more they are payed, the smarter they get (odd isn't it).
Also, the more the bankers are paid, the more creative they get. That is a good thing but also a bad thing. It is this arrangement that requires the firms to have good commitment committees to review and decide to put the firms capital behind such deals.
As a final note, if I hadn't made a lot of money for the firm, not only would I have received a minor (or no) bonus, but I would have had my staff removed (and possibly fired) and I might have even been fired. If I had been fired for poor performance, word would spread around Wall St and my career would have been over.
Yes he did, I think he was leading up to the Patriot section being given to Michelle Obamao.
“Let me guess...you didn’t watch the clip before posting...”
You guessed wrong.
Ford will prevail over GM regardless of where Obama sets GM salaries. TARP will hang over the heads of those that accepted it. They are the ones who sold out. Let ‘em rot.
“What about some of the firms and small banks forced to take TARP so they could lend it to the banks? What happens when their pay gets limited, and they had no choice?”
They had a choice. A very difficult one. But they had one.
If the government is holding the risk, the have the reins as any owner should.
But government shouldn’t be the owner...the owner should be whatever private entity would have purchase them at actual market value.
Exactly right. Thought I said spurious, specious is an even better description.
The way our incentive was structured was based on my department, but with a multiplier based on company performance. If the company failed to hit targets, the bonus multiplier was zero. And we know what something times nothing comes up to.
My first bonus was more than $50k. (And that did not count options and stock grants! I was a happy boy!) I almost fell off my chair, as I was not even aware that there WAS such a plan (we had been acquired and I was the only senior officer carried over—a point that was not lost on me, but evidently it was lost on the HR department.) I had a little bit of guilt because the front line people would see quarterly bonuses in the hundreds of dollars. But, I took it, paid the taxes and paid off all of my debt and bought my wife a new car and some fun.
If the front line knew my compensation, they would have rioted.
My point in addition to agreeing yours is this whole conversation is going to cause a lot of people to actually read those annual reports. That would be interesting.
Do you still live there?
Another note about Wall Street, while I certainly found it too be surprisingly generous to successful investment bankers and traders, I probably would, in retrospect, have chosen a different career.
I majored in what use to be called econometrics and had an opportunity to continue toward my doctorate and then go on to an academic career (probably doing dusty research in a basement with a bunch of eggheads) or to go to Wall Street.
IMO, I chose poorly.
Now that I am retired (well, semi-retired), I know there is a lot besides making money and, in fact, am a little ashamed of myself.
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