Dubai has asked to be allowed until May to pay off $60 billion in debts. Six weeks after receiving $25 billion in bailout money, Citibank loaned $8 billion to Dubai. Bank of America and Chase also had large loans. Stock markets are down today. The FDIC is broke and no more Congressional bank bailouts may mean the collapse of some too-big-to-fail banks. The only thing propping them up is holding properties on the books at inflated prices, as selling would mean showing the loss. It's coming apart.

Mike Huckabee's presidential hopes damaged by suspected cop killer Maurice Clemmons' clemency

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new...o.html#ixzz0YWKRjeK5

quote:

Originally posted by Phil1934:
Dubai has asked to be allowed until May to pay off $60 billion in debts. Six weeks after receiving $25 billion in bailout money, Citibank loaned $8 billion to Dubai. Bank of America and Chase also had large loans. Stock markets are down today. The FDIC is broke and no more Congressional bank bailouts may mean the collapse of some too-big-to-fail banks. The only thing propping them up is holding properties on the books at inflated prices, as selling would mean showing the loss. It's coming apart.

Dubai's six-year building boom grinds to halt as financial crisis takes hold

• Expatriates flee as work dries up and visas are rescinded
• Indian workers forced to leave with debts following them home

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl...b/13/dubai-boom-halt

Nativity scene in the us capitol:

The Supreme Court has ruled that there cannot be a nativity scene in the U.S. Capitol this Christmas season.

This isn’t for any religious reason. They simply have not been able to find Three Wise Men in Washington, D.C.

A search for a virgin continues.

There will be no problem, however, finding enough Donkeys to fill the stable.

quote:

Originally posted by Bob H:
Mike Huckabee's presidential hopes damaged by suspected cop killer Maurice Clemmons' clemency

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new...o.html#ixzz0YWKRjeK5

Don't take this as a show of support for Huckabee's decision...

But the article either purposely or ignorantly fails to mention a couple key points in the case:

1. That Huckabee only commuted the sentence from 108 years down to 48 years.
2. That Clemmons was 16 at the time of the original crime and no violence was involved.
3. A parole board release Clemmons after serving 11 years of that 48 year sentence.

For the record, I don't believe any President or Governor should pardon or grant clemency. Plus, this goes to show the double standard in the media... where was the uproar over Clinton pardoning all those criminals, including convicted terrorist!?

I agree Huckabe can't be held totally accountable for the killings and that there is a flaming double standard because the terrorists the rapist let off were EVIL but I hope this ends the Hucks political career, I don't trust him!
The original judge must have recognized this animal for what he turned out to be when he sentenced him to over 100 years?

Bill, you know damn well if Huckleberry was a democrat you'd be tearing him a new one right now. Don't deny it.

Greg, this is about Huckleberry, not Clinton. And if I remember correctly, yes, he was chastised for his pardons. Shall we go over the list of Bush's pardons since you're in the mood to spin this in a different direction?

Where is the fawking spin!?!?!?

I flatly stated that NO PRESIDENT OR GOVERNOR should grant pardons or clemency.

And I don't think you want to go into comparing Bush's pardons to Clintons do you!?!? Let's see, 189 to 456... Clinton pardoned nearly as many on his last day in office as Bush did his entire eight years.

President Bush wouldn't even pardon Scooter Libby!
The rapist pardoned all types of scumbags that paid off his brother and brother-in-laws!

quote:

Originally posted by stanman:
Where is the fawking spin!?!?!?

I flatly stated that NO PRESIDENT OR GOVERNOR should grant pardons or clemency.

And I don't think you want to go into comparing Bush's pardons to Clintons do you!?!? Let's see, 189 to 456... Clinton pardoned nearly as many on his last day in office as Bush did his entire eight years.

Where's the spin? You've taken something from over a decade ago and threw it into a conversation about a current event to try to take the heat off of Huckleberry's situation. There's the spin.

quote:

Originally posted by Jeremy J.: Where's the spin? You've taken something from over a decade ago and threw it into a conversation about a current event to try to take the heat off of Huckleberry's situation. There's the spin.

It's not spin when you're comparing the maelstrom around Huckabee over this deal when compared to other acts of this nature by other elected officials!!

Discussing Clinton's pardon avalanche, or any other elected officials record, is pertinent to the conversation.

quote:

where was the uproar over Clinton pardoning all those criminals, including convicted terrorist!?
Greg Stanley
I have a plan and I'm going to stick to it!

....It's not spin when you're comparing the maelstrom around Huckabee over this deal when compared to other acts of this nature by other elected officials!!

The fawk it ain't!!!!!!!!!!!!


"The problem is that his judgment on that was flawed, and Huckabee didn't take the counsel of wiser men on some of these cases," wrote conservative blogger Ed Morrissey of hotair.com. "That goes directly to executive judgment."

Wrote Dan Riehl on his blog, Riehl World View, of Huckabee's prospects in 2012 or 2016: "No Huckabee, you were the executive in charge, the lone elected decision-maker, as it were, when this man was put away and unable to gain release. YOU made it possible, not the system, the state, or even two. Own it, you hypocrite. You said recently you weren't leaning toward running for office in 2012. It gives me great satisfaction to tell you, fahgit about it, Huck-abubba."

Conservative critics had hit Huckabee during the 2008 presidential campaign over his decision to grant an early release to another convict - Wayne DuMond, who was freed in 1999, only to be accused of raping and murdering two women within a year of his release. DuMond was later convicted of murdering one of the women and died in prison in 2005.

Campaign ads during the GOP primaries compared DuMond to Willie Horton, the convict released from a Massachusetts prison on a weekend furlough program put in place by then Gov. Michael Dukakis. While freed, Horton raped a woman and attacked her fiance, a grisly crime spotlighted in an attack ad by the George H.W. Bush campaign – and one that is often credited with helping doom Dukakis' presidential chances.

"Of course, a lot of folks said the last guy was Mike Huckabee's 'Willie Horton,' " Erick Erickson wrote on his RedState blog. "How many Willie Hortons can one man have?"

Clemmons was sentenced in 1990 to 108 years in prison for a series of thefts, but was paroled in 2000 after serving 11 years in prison, due in large part to Huckabee's clemency push. Clemmons later moved to Washington State, where he was convicted of several fresh felonies - and was released on $15,000 bail after being charged with child rape a week before the coffee shop shootings.


Huckabee......Exit "Stage Right"......

Why would you pardon someone with over 100 yrs. sentence????

Why did the rapist pardon the Puerto Rican terrorists?????????????
We all know why the rapist pardoned Marc Rich, well over a million dollar payoff!!!!!!!!
On another note, our neighbors across the street packed up and left today, foreclosure or walked away, who knows! They were there about four (4) years and when they bought I said they overpaid at least $250,000.00, maybe nearer $300,000.00
Not sad to see them gone, I'd bet money they were the ones calling parking enforcement every time I backed my rig down the cul-de-sac!

bd, didn't you say "the rich get richer"?????

Just who the he11 started the ball rolling?????


Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s investment bank, survivors of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, are set to pay record combined bonuses this year.

The firms -- the three biggest banks to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- will hand out $29.7 billion in bonuses, according to analysts’ estimates. That’s up 60 percent from last year and more than the previous high of $26.8 billion in 2007. The money, split among 119,000 employees, equals $250,400 each, almost five times the $50,303 median household income in the U.S. last year, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The three will award more in stock and defer more cash payments under pressure from regulators to tie pay to long-term results, compensation experts said. They may still face public wrath over the size of bonuses after the government injected capital into all the major financial institutions following Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s collapse in September 2008.

“Wall Street is beginning to resemble Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in the film ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’” Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate on compensation at the Portland, Maine-based Corporate Library, said in an e-mail. “It doesn’t seem as if even political threat, disastrous PR, envy, rising unemployment rates and home repossessions is enough to get any of these people to refuse the bonuses they have ‘earned.’”

Fixed Income, Commodities

Bonuses for employees in fixed income will likely jump the most, 40 percent to 45 percent, while employees in asset management may see no growth in their year-end bonuses, according to a report from Options Group, a New York-based executive search and compensation consultant firm.

Average bonuses for employees at financial firms worldwide will rise about 35 percent to 40 percent this year, according to the annual report, which is set to be released this week. They will still remain below 2007 levels after dropping an average of 40 percent to 45 percent last year, the report said.

Managing directors in high-yield credit sales are expected to see some of the largest average increase in bonuses, a 50 percent jump to a range of $1.3 million to $1.7 million. The bonuses of directors in commodity sales units may also climb 50 percent to a range of $650,000 to $850,000, the report said. Managing directors in commodities trading will receive the largest bonuses for that level, an average of $4 million to $6 million each.

Clawback Clauses

Global heads of equities, commodities trading, interest- rate trading and investment banking each will receive total compensation that may reach at least $10 million, most of it coming from bonuses, according to the report.

Morgan Stanley is among banks that are offering a larger portion of bonuses in stock and instituting so-called clawback clauses to tie incentive pay to risk, the report said. JPMorgan and UBS AG are also raising base salaries for some employees to reduce the share of bonuses in total pay.

“Wall Street is all about creating wealth, and when banks start making money again, they have to pay their people,” said Michael Karp, co-founder of Options Group. “But because there’s so much public scrutiny, people will be very sensitive in terms of putting caps on some of these cash figures, and you’ll see a lot more in stock.”

Goldman Sachs

Securities firms typically use slightly less than half of their revenue to pay salaries, benefits and bonuses, a percentage that is adjusted throughout the year. In the first nine months, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan’s investment bank told their shareholders that they set aside $36.4 billion for compensation, up 27 percent from the same period a year earlier.

The three New York-based firms will likely set aside $49.5 billion for compensation for the full year, according to estimates from David Trone, an analyst at Fox-Pitt Kelton Cochran Caronia Waller in New York. That’s up from $30.9 billion last year and $44.7 billion in 2007.

The rise in compensation is led by Goldman Sachs, which had record profit in the second quarter. Its compensation expense is expected to more than double from last year to $21.9 billion, or about $691,000 per employee, according to Trone’s estimates. The expense at JPMorgan’s investment bank is expected to jump 55 percent to $12 billion, about $482,400 for each employee, while Morgan Stanley’s compensation cost will rise 27 percent to $15.6 billion, or $252,000.

‘We Made It’

Year-end bonuses usually account for about 60 percent of compensation, the Options Group report said. While the total this year is expected to be greater than in 2007, it will come to less per employee than the $256,000 paid out that year by the three firms because of increased staffing.

Bank of America in Charlotte, North Carolina, and New York- based Citigroup Inc. don’t break out compensation data for their investment-banking units.

More than a third of Wall Street finance professionals expect their bonuses to increase for 2009, according to a survey by eFinancialCareers.com, a job-search Web site specializing in the financial industry. Of the 1,074 people who responded to an e-mail poll conducted by the company in September, 36 percent said they’re anticipating a bigger annual payout and 11 percent said it will jump by at least half.

Wall Street is behaving like, “We made it through the storm, and now it’s back to doing things that we know how to do in our comfortable environment,” said Mark Borges, compensation consultant at Compensia Inc. in Corte Madera, California. “It really runs counter to the things you’re hearing out of the administration, about how things have to change.”

Fed Guidelines

The Fed said last month it will review the 28 largest banks to ensure that compensation doesn’t create incentives for the kinds of risky investments that brought the global financial system to the edge of collapse, prompting bailouts of firms including Bank of America and Citigroup. It also offered guidelines on making pay more tied to risk management.

Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon and John Mack, the chief executive officers of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, were summoned to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Nov. 2 by President William Dudley. They were told they had to follow the new rules, people familiar with the matter said.

Blankfein set a Wall Street pay record in 2007 when he was awarded a $67.9 million bonus on top of his $600,000 salary. He went without a bonus last year after the firm reported its first quarterly loss and accepted financial support from the government. Other bank CEOs, including Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit and Morgan Stanley’s Mack, also didn’t take bonuses in 2008.

Feinberg Rules

Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration’s special master on pay, ordered pay cuts Oct. 22 averaging 50 percent for top executives at seven taxpayer-rescued companies and will rule on the pay structures of the 26th to 100th highest-paid employees at those firms by the end of the year.

Feinberg’s decisions on the second tier could have more influence on other companies than his initial rulings, said Rose Marie Orens, a senior partner at Compensation Advisory Partners LLC in New York.

“Here he gets to see the methodology,” said Orens. “If a company says it’s paying from revenue, he can come back and say it would be better if you paid out of profits. He has that kind of latitude.”

Feinberg’s rulings are “making their way into the hallways of non-financial companies,” even if they aren’t likely to influence pay practices at private equity firms or hedge funds, she said.

Bank Stocks

Wall Street firms may have to find other ways to stagger payments. Even shifting compensation to stock from cash might not blunt attacks from politicians and a U.S. public that faces a 10.2 percent unemployment rate, the highest since 1983.

Executives who received stock awards early this year in the midst of the credit crisis are gaining from the rally in bank stocks. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index has risen 24 percent so far this year and has more than doubled from an almost 17-year low on March 6. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley’s shares have more than doubled this year, while JPMorgan’s have climbed 38 percent.

“The big firms are going to need to be very creative now, because of the populist sentiment,” Peter Weinberg, 52, a founder of New York-based Perella Weinberg Partners LP, said last week at the “Capitalism and the Future” forum co- sponsored by Bloomberg LP and the Aspen Institute in New York. “It is very, very intense, it is bitter, and I understand it.”

Weinberg, who ran Goldman Sachs’s international operations from 1999 to 2005, is a grandson of Sidney Weinberg, the firm’s senior partner from 1930 to 1969.

Toxic Assets

Credit Suisse decided last year to use leveraged loans and commercial mortgage-backed debt, some of the securities blamed for generating the financial crisis, as part of variable compensation for senior employees. The bank told employees in August that the pool of toxic assets gained 17 percent since January, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Weinberg said one possibility would be for large firms to take part of their bonus pool and use the funds to serve a function helpful to the economy, such as a small-business lender. Employees could be paid years later from the profits of the new entity.

“One thing they could do is to take an amount of money that would have been used for compensation and make a commercial investment that ultimately would go to those who would have been compensated,” Weinberg said. “You’re not taking away compensation that arguably was due to them, but what you’re doing is you’re adding risk to it.”

Disclosing Details

While banks may change the way they structure pay, they probably can’t avoid disclosing the money as compensation, said Steven W. Rabitz, a former compensation lawyer at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. who now works as a partner at law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LP in New York.

“One way or another there’s going to be some kind of disclosure,” Rabitz said. “The devil is in the details. People are talking about the details, and people are talking about the structures.”

Goldman Sachs is considering a new charitable program and has been working with Bridgespan Group, a Boston-based philanthropy consulting and recruiting firm, people familiar with the matter said last month. A charitable gift may be announced by the end of the year, when the firm awards bonuses.

Lucas van Praag, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs in New York, declined to comment on the firm’s compensation plans for this year. He said the company ties its pay closely to revenue.

New York Taxes

“Over the last eight years compensation at Goldman Sachs has been perfectly correlated with net revenue,” van Praag said. “The average annual earnings generated per employee over the same period are $221,731, which is 67 percent more than our next most profitable competitor.”

Kristin Lemkau, a JPMorgan spokeswoman, and Mark Lake, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, both declined to comment.

A jump in Wall Street bonuses this year may bring relief to Albany and New York City as the state and its biggest metropolis struggle with more than $14 billion in budget deficits this fiscal year and next. The benefit may be muted since many of the bonuses will be awarded in stock that isn’t taxed immediately.

Before the financial meltdown slammed bank earnings last year, Wall Street’s compensation and corporate profits provided 20 percent of New York state tax revenue and 9 percent of the city’s taxes. Bonuses in 2008 fell 44 percent from the prior year, to $18.4 billion, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

‘Never Return’

The reduction cost the state $1 billion in income tax revenue and New York City $275 million, he said. State personal income tax collections in the first six months of the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, declined $4.4 billion, or 21.6 percent, from the same period a year earlier, DiNapoli’s September cash report said.

The days of Wall Street compensation driving double-digit growth in state tax revenue “may never return,” Robert Megna, director of the New York State Division of the Budget, said today in prepared remarks for a public budget hearing. The division is expecting financial industry bonuses to drop 22 percent in the 2009-2010 fiscal year.

“They are unlikely to have a substantial, positive impact on state revenues in the short-term,” Megna said of the bonuses. “While some investment houses have reported stronger than expected profits, other major firms, such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, have disappeared altogether during the recent financial crisis.”

‘Not as Rosy’

The size of this year’s bonus payments to investment bankers and the public profile of the firms have obscured the struggles occurring in other parts of the finance industry, said Orens, of Compensation Advisory Partners.

More than 337,000 financial jobs have been eliminated worldwide since the middle of 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Finance industry jobs in New York City have fallen by 41,400 in the two years through August, according to the New York State Department of Labor.

“It’s a narrow area, though clearly large in terms of dollars,” Orens said. “Asset management is still hurting, the hedge funds are still down, many haven’t met their performance hurdles, and the normal lending functions and real estate are not pretty. It’s not as rosy everywhere else.”

Oh to be an investment banker and an unscrupulous bastard at the same time!

Yosemite Sam must know he's got an election coming up!
He's into his normal rope-a-dope talking like a CONSERVATIVE, hopefully the people of Arizona's memory will be long enough to remember his treachery to CONSERVATIVE causes and retire him!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The socialist donkies disdain for our military personnel is put on prominent display yet again!
A bunch of Republicam congressional members have sent a letter to the Secretary of Defense asking him to intervene in the railroading of the Navy Seals, not a donkey name to be seen!
The cowardly brass are trying to railroad these guys on the word of a jihadist terrorist. They thought these guys would quietly accept penalties endangering their careers and now they intend to Court Martial them when they refused!

Bill...Give me a link...I haven't read about this yet....been under a rock..(hospital)...send me a link.

Never mind...I found it. COURT MARTIAL...HELL NO

Maybe a Medal of Honor each....but CM...phock that!

Jeremy,

Comparing the pardons of Clinton to the pardons of Bush is probably not a place you want to go. Take a look at the people that Clinton Pardoned, then look at who Bush did. I think you will see some thing that absolutly shocks you, not just the numbers, but what they were convicted for. Not just white collar crime.