Lloyd, Sister Mary Margaret would like to see you in her office.

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 04/05/2011 - 07:03

 

From Katya Wachtel at Business Insiders, who has been doing a real nice job lately of providing fun but useful stories.

As always, the photo will link you up with the story.

 

Nuns Demand Goldman Sachs Explain Why It Paid $69.5 Million To The Top 5 Execs In 2010

Katya Wachtel   Apr. 4, 2011
 

 

Goldman Sachs will pay its top five executives just under $70 million for their work in 2010, and four orders of catholic nuns are demanding that the firm launch a review over whether the pay is excessive.

Lloyd Blankfein and his top lieutenants were awarded between $13 and $14 million for their work last year; they all received a cash bonus of $5.4 million.

The nun and charity group has asked that the firm's Compensation Committee reveal extremely detailed information about the compensation.

 

Hope she still has that damn yardstick.

 

April fools story

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 04/05/2011 - 06:41

 

And the joke is on us.

Click the photo to link up with this Bloomberg story.

 

Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak
By Bradley Keoun and Craig Torres - Apr 1, 2011 1:53 PM ET

 

 

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.

 

Good news, more money is heading your way

Submitted by Roanman on Mon, 04/04/2011 - 06:36

 

The bad news of course is that the money you have ..... worth less.

 

 

Click the chart to link to a long, rambling but interesting David Galland piece with some history of Nuclear Power that I had never heard before.

 

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Submitted by Roanman on Sun, 04/03/2011 - 07:57

 

The official, published chart for the Consumer's Price Index located on page 5 of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' "Detailed Report for January 2011" looks as follows.

"Core Inflation" as they like to call it is running at about 1.5%.

  That's not so terrible.

I personally would like to see it at 0% or even negative, but what the hell do I know?

Except, as many of us know, "Core CPI" doesn't include food and fuel.

Hmmm ..... I'm thinking government economists must not eat or drive.

 

 

The other day at the facebook page for this site, someone plugged John Williams' outstanding site, Shadow Government Statistics.

Despite the fact that we've known about this site for a long time, we've never really explored it thoroughly, mostly because so many of the people that we read, are reading it for us.

Once again, big mistake.

Anyway, to begin with the primers are free, mostly 12-15 paragraphs, easy to read and enormously worthwhile.

The following short excepts from Mr. Williams' primer on the Consumer Price Index offer some insight into the hows and whys of those items and calculations that do go into the CPI, and in so doing go a long way toward explaining how it is that government economists neither eat nor drive.

 

Inflation, as reported by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is understated by roughly 7% per year. This is due to recent redefinitions of the series as well as to flawed methodologies, particularly adjustments to price measures for quality changes.

The CPI was designed to help businesses, individuals and the government adjust their financial planning and considerations for the impact of inflation. The CPI worked reasonably well for those purposes into the early-1980s.

In recent decades, however, the reporting system increasingly succumbed to pressures from miscreant politicians, who were and are intent upon stealing income from social security recipients, without ever taking the issue of reduced entitlement payments before the public or Congress for approval.

In particular, changes made in CPI methodology during the Clinton Administration understated inflation significantly, and, through a cumulative effect with earlier changes that began in the late-Carter and early Reagan Administrations have reduced current social security payments by roughly half from where they would have been otherwise.

That means Social Security checks today would be about double had the various changes not been made.

 

 

As always, click on the above chart to link up to the entire piece.

Way, super double, highly recommended.

 

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