Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Money Making Schemes

Pension funds will be prevented from investing in risky assets, including stocks, by the Pensions Regulator under plans to stop weaker companies with large pension shortfalls from making huge bets.

David Norgrove, chairman of the regulator, will outline his concerns that some schemes are taking risks that could leave a bigger hole in the industry funded Pension Protection Fund in a speech to funds on Tuesday.

“We have to ensure that they are not putting all their money on the 2:30 at Newmarket and if it doesn’t work out, they will fall back on the PPF,” he said. “To some extent, we have seen some behaviour like that.”

Some schemes were so underfunded their only hope of recovery lay in big bets. The regulator was also concerned about standards of governance, particularly for smaller schemes.

“We come across a fair degree of criminality at the smaller end of schemes,” said Mr Norgrove, whose six-year tenure at the regulator, created in 2004, is drawing to an end.

Investment curbs would affect a few weak companies initially but as schemes close to new members and to future accruals trustees will need to insure that the investment strategy takes as few risks as possible. “Eventually it will move up the scale,” he said. Companies will need to be well funded and have few, or no, investment risks.

Under those circumstances, defined benefit schemes might cease to be significant investors in equities and property.

Mr Norgrove said that despite cash injections from employers, defined benefit schemes today are not much better funded. “Contributions have had to run to keep up with rising longevity, falling discount rates and shortfalls in investment returns,” he said. “We clearly can’t have a situation where we move from recovery plan to recovery plan.”

Pensions agency head weighs risk and reward

As David Norgrove, the first chairman of the UK Pension Regulator comes to the end of his term, Britain’s retirement landscape is radically altered from its condition when he first arrived in 2005.

Nearly 60 per cent of defined benefit schemes are closed to new members – up from 44 per cent when he first began counting them in 2006 – and 21 per cent are closed to future benefit accrual, up from 12 per cent at that time. And Britain is about to embark on a universal system of near-compulsory pension provision where every employer will need to offer workers a chance to contribute to a savings pot for retirement where none existed just a few years ago.

Moreover, about 150,000 people had lost all or part of their pension when the legislation that set up the regulator was passed in 2004. Almost none have lost their benefits since.

But some things have not changed, Mr Norgrove notes in remarks prepared for an address to the National Association of Pension Funds on Tuesday.

“Schemes are only marginally better funded then when the scheme specific funding regime was introduced five years ago. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the economic conditions have largely counteracted the gains that schemes had started to make before the downturn,” said Mr Norgrove, who steps down at the end of this month.

Thus, in his parting shot, Mr Norgrove is hinting at the imminent death of one of the sacred cows of defined benefit pensions; that investment in risk assets – equities, property, commodities or hedge funds – can reduce overall risk and make defined benefit retirement promises affordable.

Indeed, he goes so far ... as to say that woefully underfunded schemes of companies with weak balance sheets should have their investments in risky assets limited. Schemes such as these “can only hope to meet their promises by taking very high levels of investment risk with significant potential to go wrong”.

The regulator, he said, must make sure that those deficits get no bigger than they already are. And that means cutting investment risk. But as schemes close to new members, and increasingly, to future accrual by existing members, employers have little vested interest in the welfare of the scheme. Increasingly, he said, these will be run by elderly member-nominated trustees and these, too, will have to curtail investment risk. And trustees will need to be aggressive in pursuing contributions.

Although Mr Norgrove did not say so specifically, the landscape he describes is one where pension fund investment no longer props up stock markets.

In his parting remarks, Mr Norgrove also took aim at two of the most sensitive issues for industry. First, he reiterated the regulator’s view that trustees must carefully monitor offers from employers to scheme members for “enhanced transfer values”, which are very often a bad deal for members. Pensions advisers have been fighting back hard to make it easier for employers to reduce retirement obligations by offering ETVs.

The regulator, he said, believes there are a handful of instances where accepting one might be beneficial – where the member cannot expect to live too long or has no dependents who will benefit from defined benefit pensions, for example. Also, if the offer is significantly superior to insurance cover provided by the PPF, a transfer might make sense.

Second, Mr Norgrove made it clear that defined contribution benefits, which are emerging as the dominant retirement savings scheme, need work. A new consultation on structure will be aired next year, he said.

But for now, he said, the myriad small schemes which dominate DC pension provision are not likely to serve the interests of savers well.

“What we don’t want is another 50,000 DC schemes,” he said. “They don’t have the scale for the governance and they don’t have the scale to keep the charges down.”

Is Mr. Norgrove right to limit risky bets by small underfunded pension
plans? I think so. Taking risky bets to make up for losses might sound
perfectly fine, but it could easily backfire, especially if we head into
a protracted period of debt deflation.

A colleague of mine
remarked that in the last ten years, JGBs outperformed the S&P 500.
And yet 10-years ago everyone was screaming about how low Japanese bond
yields were and many hedge funds were actively shorting JGBs. They all
got slaughtered, and more will get slaughtered shorting Japanese bonds,
even now.

But isn't the Fed giving money away to banks so they
can trade risk assets all around the world? Shouldn't pension funds also
be allowed to take huge bets? That all depends on the internal
expertise of the pension fund managers, on their risk management
process, and most importantly, on their governance.

I'm not
saying to go all in government bonds just in case debt deflation hits,
but it's simply foolhardy to think that investing more in alternatives
will help shore up these pension funds. All this to say that sometimes
it's worth bucking the trend and playing it safe. I know hedge funds,
commodities, real estate and private equity sound sexy, but the truth
is it's a lot sexier to limit your downside risk, especially if you're a
small underfunded pension plan paying out benefits.

USA Today unveiled their database of college football assistants’ salaries. Here are the five most overpaid with two caveats. (1) Monte Kiffin’s salary was unavailable because USC is private (2) I stuck to those currently employed, so Greg Davis and Steve Addazio were spared.

Nick Holt (Washington – $650,000): He’s the nation’s 7th highest paid assistant. Neither of his Husky defenses have finished in the Top 75 in yards against. A DC pulling down his money should slow down top opposing offenses. His unit gave up 56 against Nebraska, 44 against Arizona, 41 against Stanford and 53 against Oregon. Yes, he got it done at USC, under Pete Carroll’s tutelage with Pete Carroll’s players.

Norm Chow (UCLA – $640,000): Norm Chow is a delicate genius. He’s 65. He doesn’t recruit. He’s there for his schemes, which have been ineffective. After having offenses ranked 111th in 2008 and 87th in 2009, Rick Neuheisel forced Chow to change his system to the Pistol. They were ranked 98th. At this point Chow is an empty name and he’s the exact sort of uninventive hire that will leave Rick Neuheisel unemployed by this time next year.

Gary Crowton (LSU – $450,000): LSU’s offense ranked 89th in total yardage. The unit probably cost the Tigers a national title shot. What’s pathetic is that this was a marked improvement over 2009, when they ranked 111th. LSU has not ranked in the Top 50 since 2007. That’s inexcusable with the amount of talent available.

Chuck Long (Kansas – $350,000): Long inherited a Kansas offense that was Top 25 three years in a row. This year, Long’s focus-less spread/pro hybrid left them ranked 113th. Long has not been affiliated with an offense that finished higher than 70th in total yardage since 2004 and that was when he piggy-backed on the work of Leach and Mangino. He was bad enough this year to overshadow “former Detroit Lions quarterback” and “worst head coach in San Diego State history” from his resume.

Tony Gibson (Michigan – $231,500): Gibson has a dual role. He is Michigan’s secondary coach and its Special Teams coach. Both units were among the worst in Division I-A. However, you have to give him credit.

[Photo via Getty]

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Green Giant Planned for Portland « Liveshots

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Small Business News: Your Legal Brief

A big part of running a small business these days involves understanding legal issues, both those that could impact your business directly and those that could.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Making Money Scam

Sometimes the obvious isn't clear. We've covered the theft of homes via "hanging judges" in mortgage courts before. At the heart of this confusion (or scam, depending on whether you're a victim or a beneficiary), lies MERS, the virtual mortgage registry that's replaced the handling of mortgage ownership in this brave new slice-and-dice derivative world.

Matt Taibbi, who will have a new big piece about this in a coming issue of Rolling Stone, provides this handy metaphor for understanding what MERS actually is. Here's one slice:

Imagine, say, a family of twelve, two elderly parents in Iowa and ten adult children scattered in different states all over the country. Mom and Dad on the farm own one Ford F-150 that they owe $300 a month on. Every month, the truck gets passed to a different family member, who in turn becomes responsible for the monthly payment. But no matter who has the car and whose turn it is to come up with the $300, the truck stays in Dad's name and the money, in the end, comes to Ford Finance via Dad's checking account.

Looking at this as an individual and unique case, you wouldn't think there was much that was inherently wrong with this setup. Obviously the family arrangement violates the spirit of many laws and procedures [interesting list of spiritual violations here]. But again, looking at this as an individual case, not many people would say any of these "violations" were major moral transgressions, if they were really moral transgressions at all. After all, this is family!

But once you take this setup and institutionalize it, and employ it everywhere on a vast scale, it becomes seriously problematic. This is particularly true if, say, Pop begins allowing his kids to "rent" the car out to non-family members, so long as they kick a small fee upstairs. Say it's March and Pop gives the truck to son Jimmy in Toledo; in April Jimmy gives the truck to his buddy Rick in Akron, charging the $300 payment plus a $20 convenience fee. May: Jimmy gives the car to his girlfriend Trudy in Phoenix, telling her to wire $300 plus another $20 back to Pops in Iowa; she in turn lends the car to her occasional lesbian love interest Madison, who begins renting the car on a day-to-day basis in Tuba City as part of her family's Painted Desert Resort and Tourism business, etc. etc. And she's now kicking the fees back to Iowa.

Within a year Pop is buying fifty vehicles an hour and shuttling cars to new customers all over the country, collecting millions in fees every day; he becomes a billion-dollar corporate fixture, hiring the entire local Elks club to come with him to work as support staff.

So now, to take this already absurdly overwrought metaphor one final painful step further ...

I knew the Elks were involved. Tempted to click through? I am, and I've already read it.

And for fans of straight talk, he provides this handy summary in easy-to-memorize form. The problem in a nutshell:

In short, the mortgage industry considers MERS owner enough to foreclose on you, but not owner enough to be sued, or reasoned with, or even to provide basic customer service.

That's MERS. Thanks, Matt, for making the painfully obvious painfully clear.

Bankers.

GP

In theory, this group exists to safeguard the integrity of the multitrillion-dollar market. In practice, it also defends the dominance of the big banks. The banks in this group, which is affiliated with a new derivatives clearinghouse, have fought to block other banks from entering the market, and they are also trying to thwart efforts to make full information on prices and fees freely available. Banks’ influence over this market, and over clearinghouses like the one this select group advises, has costly implications for businesses large and small,

According to the Times, the marketplace as it functions now “adds up to higher costs to all Americans,” said Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates most derivatives. More oversight of the banks in this market is needed, he said. Big banks influence the rules governing derivatives through a variety of industry groups. The banks’ latest point of influence are clearinghouses like ICE Trust, which holds the monthly meetings with the nine bankers in New York.

Really? Gosh, I had no idea. The ICE people told me that wasn’t true at all. I have many, many pages of correspondence to that effect… “When you limit participation in the governance of an entity to a few like-minded institutions or individuals who have an interest in keeping competitors out, you have the potential for bad things to happen. It’s antitrust 101,” said Robert E. Litan, who helped oversee the Justice Department’s Nasdaq investigation as deputy assistant attorney general. Better say goodbye to Grandma, Mr. Litan…

Critics have called these banks the “derivatives dealers club,” and they warn that the club is unlikely to give up ground easily. The Times points out "Perhaps no business in finance is as profitable today as derivatives. Not making loans. Not offering credit cards. Not advising on mergers and acquisitions. Not managing money for the wealthy."

The secrecy surrounding derivatives trading is a key factor enabling banks to make such large profits and the banks guard that secrecy very closely. In theory, the Dodd-Frank bill will eliminate much of the abuse that is going on in the derivatives market but already, the newly-elected House and Senate Republicans are looking to turn back to clock, which is apropos because, as Barry Ritholtz points out: it was the dreaded Commodity Futures Modernization Act that allowed the rampant shadow banking system to develop.

Source: A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Trading in Derivatives by LOUISE STORY, NY Times

See also: Michael Snyder's Derivatives: The Quadrillion Dollar Financial Casino Completely Dominated By The Big International Banks and Trillions In Secret Fed Bailouts For Global Corporations And Foreign Banks – Has The Federal Reserve Become A Completely Unaccountable Global Bailout Machine?.

robert shumake

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista ...

Fashion Industry News, Designers, Runway Shows, Style Advice. Send Tips � Advertise � About Us � Network � Above the Law � AltTransport � Breaking Media � Fashionista. Search for: ... Posted in: Beauty, News ...

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robert shumake detroit

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Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.

robert shumake

Imagine, say, a family of twelve, two elderly parents in Iowa and ten adult children scattered in different states all over the country. Mom and Dad on the farm own one Ford F-150 that they owe $300 a month on. Every month, the truck gets passed to a different family member, who in turn becomes responsible for the monthly payment. But no matter who has the car and whose turn it is to come up with the $300, the truck stays in Dad's name and the money, in the end, comes to Ford Finance via Dad's checking account.

Looking at this as an individual and unique case, you wouldn't think there was much that was inherently wrong with this setup. Obviously the family arrangement violates the spirit of many laws and procedures [interesting list of spiritual violations here]. But again, looking at this as an individual case, not many people would say any of these "violations" were major moral transgressions, if they were really moral transgressions at all. After all, this is family!

But once you take this setup and institutionalize it, and employ it everywhere on a vast scale, it becomes seriously problematic. This is particularly true if, say, Pop begins allowing his kids to "rent" the car out to non-family members, so long as they kick a small fee upstairs. Say it's March and Pop gives the truck to son Jimmy in Toledo; in April Jimmy gives the truck to his buddy Rick in Akron, charging the $300 payment plus a $20 convenience fee. May: Jimmy gives the car to his girlfriend Trudy in Phoenix, telling her to wire $300 plus another $20 back to Pops in Iowa; she in turn lends the car to her occasional lesbian love interest Madison, who begins renting the car on a day-to-day basis in Tuba City as part of her family's Painted Desert Resort and Tourism business, etc. etc. And she's now kicking the fees back to Iowa.

Within a year Pop is buying fifty vehicles an hour and shuttling cars to new customers all over the country, collecting millions in fees every day; he becomes a billion-dollar corporate fixture, hiring the entire local Elks club to come with him to work as support staff.

So now, to take this already absurdly overwrought metaphor one final painful step further ...

In short, the mortgage industry considers MERS owner enough to foreclose on you, but not owner enough to be sued, or reasoned with, or even to provide basic customer service.

That's MERS. Thanks, Matt, for making the painfully obvious painfully clear.

Bankers.

GP

Source: A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Trading in Derivatives by LOUISE STORY, NY Times

robert shumake detroit

robert shumake

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista ...

Baby Boomers and Sacrifice - AOL News

WASHINGTON -- Baby boomers have long been derided as a bunch of spoiled brats -- a.

500 More Red-Winged Blackbirds Found Dead in Louisiana - AOL News

Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.

robert shumake

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista ...

Baby Boomers and Sacrifice - AOL News

WASHINGTON -- Baby boomers have long been derided as a bunch of spoiled brats -- a.

500 More Red-Winged Blackbirds Found Dead in Louisiana - AOL News

Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.

robert shumake

Making money online is one of the most abused and searched terms on the internet. We have all seen the "work from home and earn $900 a week" ads and banners. I make a decent amount of money from the internet, but I never made a thousand dollars a week working online. One website I have found for making money online is Café Press. You can make money online at Café Press by creating sellable designs for shirts, jackets, children's clothes, dog clothes, mugs, hats, and more. I suppose the draw back is that in order to make money online with Café Press you have to be a tad on the creative side. There are thousands upon thousands of designs online at Café press. Some of them are good, but most of them are nothing more than a catchy phrase and some bad clip art. Personally I can't believe anyone buys half the stuff on there.

Making Money Online- Testing the Water

My first suggestion for making money online with café press is to test the water. Come up with some really good designs and then post them online in some related forums to see what your potential customers think. What I mean is let's say you want to make some shirts geared toward dog owners. Create a few designs and then go visit some dog lovers' forums and message boards.

Post a very friendly topic saying that you were thinking of starting a company that sold made humorous shirts for dog lovers and that you wanted to see what they thought of your ideas. Make sure to be friendly so that your post doesn't sound like SPAM. Must users will give you great feedback. Sometimes you can even use these posts to get ideas for other designs. Knowing your customers is the first step to making money online.

Once you get some good feedback on your designs and have decided which ones are likely to make you the most money online go ahead and sign p for a free Café Press account. The free account is a good way to test the money making ability of your designs, but it comes with some drawbacks. With the free account you can only create one design per style of shirt. This means you couldn't offer one design on a variety of products. This is CafePress's way of letting you test the waters.

Making Money Online- Opening a Café Press Store

My suggestion about knowing when to open a store is this; once you make your first $35 dollars I would start thinking about opening your store. Why $35? For starters that is the amount of money it takes to purchase a 6 month subscription plan. Thus you have just put your soon to be money making store online for free!

As soon as you have the ability to open a store I would do it. Take all your existing designs and put them on as many things as possible. The key to making money online with Café Press is having a larger selection. The big money makers are shirts and jackets so get those up as soon as possible. You will also want to keep coming up with more designs. Like I said the more you have for sale the more money you can make. Even if you only think your design is ok, just put it up there. I have designs I thought no one would ever buy, but I'm always surprised that someone buys them. Once I had a design I thought no one would ever buy and one customer ended up buying 15 shirts of that one designs. It just goes to show that you never know what designs are going to make you money.

Making Money Online- Tips

If you really want to give your designs an edge against the other and make some money there are a few things you should do. The biggest is to make sure you optimize your items. The way to do this is to make sure you name your item correctly and write a good item description, and section teaser.

When you are naming your product don't just name it say, smiling shirt, name it Dog Shirt- Smiling. Dog shirts would more than likely be your most searched term so now you have just put your self ahead of all the other dog shirt sellers and on the path to making more money online.

No one really reads the descriptions of the shirts on Café Press so just use this room to saturate your key words. Try to use them as much as possible without SPAMing them. Make sure to create the description and section tester. This is an extra step most store owners don't do.

Making Money Online- Conclusion

So those are some of my money making tip of selling online with Café Press. Feel free to visit my store at www.cafepress.com/pptt

robert shumake detroit

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista ...

Baby Boomers and Sacrifice - AOL News

WASHINGTON -- Baby boomers have long been derided as a bunch of spoiled brats -- a.

500 More Red-Winged Blackbirds Found Dead in Louisiana - AOL News

Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.

robert shumake detroit

robert shumake

Imagine, say, a family of twelve, two elderly parents in Iowa and ten adult children scattered in different states all over the country. Mom and Dad on the farm own one Ford F-150 that they owe $300 a month on. Every month, the truck gets passed to a different family member, who in turn becomes responsible for the monthly payment. But no matter who has the car and whose turn it is to come up with the $300, the truck stays in Dad's name and the money, in the end, comes to Ford Finance via Dad's checking account.

Looking at this as an individual and unique case, you wouldn't think there was much that was inherently wrong with this setup. Obviously the family arrangement violates the spirit of many laws and procedures [interesting list of spiritual violations here]. But again, looking at this as an individual case, not many people would say any of these "violations" were major moral transgressions, if they were really moral transgressions at all. After all, this is family!

But once you take this setup and institutionalize it, and employ it everywhere on a vast scale, it becomes seriously problematic. This is particularly true if, say, Pop begins allowing his kids to "rent" the car out to non-family members, so long as they kick a small fee upstairs. Say it's March and Pop gives the truck to son Jimmy in Toledo; in April Jimmy gives the truck to his buddy Rick in Akron, charging the $300 payment plus a $20 convenience fee. May: Jimmy gives the car to his girlfriend Trudy in Phoenix, telling her to wire $300 plus another $20 back to Pops in Iowa; she in turn lends the car to her occasional lesbian love interest Madison, who begins renting the car on a day-to-day basis in Tuba City as part of her family's Painted Desert Resort and Tourism business, etc. etc. And she's now kicking the fees back to Iowa.

Within a year Pop is buying fifty vehicles an hour and shuttling cars to new customers all over the country, collecting millions in fees every day; he becomes a billion-dollar corporate fixture, hiring the entire local Elks club to come with him to work as support staff.

So now, to take this already absurdly overwrought metaphor one final painful step further ...

In short, the mortgage industry considers MERS owner enough to foreclose on you, but not owner enough to be sued, or reasoned with, or even to provide basic customer service.

That's MERS. Thanks, Matt, for making the painfully obvious painfully clear.

Bankers.

GP

Source: A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Trading in Derivatives by LOUISE STORY, NY Times

robert shumake

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista ...

Baby Boomers and Sacrifice - AOL News

WASHINGTON -- Baby boomers have long been derided as a bunch of spoiled brats -- a.

500 More Red-Winged Blackbirds Found Dead in Louisiana - AOL News

Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.

robert shumake detroit

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Making Money

Don't Worry, Howard Stern's Still Making a Ludicrous Amount of Money

In your sunny Thursday media column: Howard Stern returns to Sirius, the NYT social media editor disappears, Brenda Starr dies, errors galore, and more!

Howard Stern has signed a five year deal to keep his show on Sirius Radio. No exact monetary figure yet, but his last deal was $100 million a year, and he called this deal "very fair," so it has to be in the same ballpark. The good thing is it keeps Howard Stern fans all in one easily identifiable media ghetto.

The New York Times has quietly eliminated its useless (we say that with no prejudice) "Social Media Editor" position. Jennifer Preston, who held it, is returning to reporting. The paper will reportedly "shift social media responsibilities to Aron Pilhofer‘s interactive news team." Ah well. We'll always have the archives of Jennifer Preston's Twitter feed to remember this amazing time in history.

After 70 years, "Brenda Starr, Reporter" is ending as a daily comic strip. Brenda Starr will take over as the New York Times social media editor.

Regret The Error's "Year in Media Errors and Corrections" list is well worth reading tits.

Confidential to Joe Lieberman: keep talking all that shit about investigating the New York Times for Wikileaks. See how that works out for you.

[Photo: Getty]

Send an email to the author of this post at Hamilton@gawker.com.

Two years into the Obama presidency and the economic data is still looking grim. Don't be fooled by the gyrations of the stock market, where optimism is mostly a reflection of the ability of financial corporations -- thanks to massive government largesse -- to survive the mess they created. The basics are dismal: unemployment is unacceptably high, the December consumer confidence index is down, and housing prices have fallen for four months in a row. The number of Americans living in poverty has never been higher, and a majority in a Washington Post poll said they were worried about making their next mortgage or rent payment.

In a parallel universe lives Peter Orszag, President Barack Obama's former budget director and key adviser, who even faster than his mentor, Robert Rubin, has passed through that revolving platinum door linking the White House with Wall Street. The goal is to use your government position to advance the interests of your future employer, and Orszag and Rubin's actions in the government and then at Citigroup provide stunning examples of the synergy between big government and high finance.

As Bill Clinton's treasury secretary, Rubin presided over the dismantling of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal legislation that would have prohibited the creation of the too-big-to-fail Citigroup. He was rewarded with a $15-million-a-year job at Citigroup, where he became a leader in the bank's aggressive move into high-risk ventures. An SEC report in September claimed that Rubin as Citigroup chairman was aware that the bank failed to disclose $40 billion it held in subprime mortgages before the collapse.

During those years at Citigroup, Rubin financed the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, an economic policy program, and named Orszag, a Clinton economic adviser, as its director. The Hamilton Project continued to celebrate Rubin's deregulation philosophy up to the point of utter embarrassment. Clearly, Orszag is not easily embarrassed, for upon taking his new job recently he boasted "I am pleased to be joining Citi, with its unmatched global platform and dedication to providing clients with service and advice."

The most damning comment on this corrupt syndrome was offered by former Citigroup co-chief executive John Reed, who had worked with Rubin to get Glass-Steagall reversed and now is a sharp critic of the result. "We continue to listen to the same people whose errors in judgment were central to the problem," Reed told Bloomberg News. "I'm astounded because we basically dropped the world's biggest economy because of an error in bank management." Reed estimated that the financial deregulation proposals contained in the Dodd-Frank bill and other reforms of the Obama administration represent only 25 percent of the change needed.

The failure to provide serious regulation of the financial industry to avoid future downturns is documented in devastating detail in that Dec. 28 Bloomberg report, written by Christine Harper:

"The U.S. government, promising to make the system safer, buckled under many of the financial industry's protests. Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban any form of derivatives."

The reason for that failure is obvious from the president's choice of advisers featuring Rubin acolytes from the Clinton years. Harper writes: "While Obama vowed to change the system, he filled his economic team with people who helped create it," referring to, among others, Timothy F. Geithner, who had gone from the Clinton Treasury Department to head the New York Fed, where he presided over the salvaging of Citigroup and AIG. As Obama's treasury secretary he was quick to appoint a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as his chief of staff. Geithner's subservience to Wall Street was reinforced by White House top economic adviser Lawrence Summers, Rubin's deputy and then replacement in the Clinton administration who pushed through the repeal of Glass Steagall and fought against the regulation of derivatives.

And with the decisive assistance from both a Republican and Democratic president, all has worked out just as planned for the banks. Harper reports: "The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg."

It's all wonderfully bipartisan. Recently it was announced that Carlos Gutierrez, commerce secretary under George W. Bush, had been named to a high position at Citigroup. For President Obama, there's no cause for worry about the loss of indispensable talent from his administration. Orszag's replacement as head of the Office of Management and Budget, Jacob J. Lew, was both a member of Rubin's Hamilton Project and a former Citigroup executive -- thus insuring that government of the banks, by the banks, for the banks shall not perish from the earth.

Larry Kramer: This Is Why Fox News Continues To Roll

People are getting lazy about forming their own opinions.

Police: Fox News Flubbed 'Granny Terrorist' Story | TPMMuckraker

Law enforcement officials says Fox News' report of a probe into a Indiana grandmother for alleged terrorist ties was taken out of context and that the reporter based her report of an investigation off her own tip.

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New York City to Snooki: fuhgeddaboudit. MTV wanted.

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Ways of Making Money

Taegan D. Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You
Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political
management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from
both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public
policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country,
including the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, San Francisco
Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Christian Science
Monitor.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

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"Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art," Andy Warhol famously said. "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art." Having gotten his start as an immensely successful commercial artist selling product illustrations to advertisers and department stores, Warhol bent the American consumerist system to artistic ends throughout his career -- embracing capitalism at a time when many in the creative sphere viewed it skeptically, if not with outright hostility. Now a new exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art called "Andy Warhol Enterprises" has seized upon a recent resurgence of interest in the artist's work to closely examine just how Warhol treated business, commerce, and, above all, money in his art and life.

At an economic moment when the art market is booming -- with a Warhol painting selling for $63.4 million at Phillips de Pury last month -- as the rest of the country struggles through a grueling recession, wealthy businessmen have been demonstrating extraordinary confidence in art as a liquid financial asset. Warhol, it could be said, took the opposite approach -- he saw business as a dependable artistic asset. To discuss the ways in which the Pop artist approached this sweeping subject, ARTINFO executive editor Andrew M. Goldstein spoke to the exhibition's co-curator Sarah Urist Green, who organized the show with art critic Allison Unruh.

Andy Warhol for Sony Beta cassette tapes, 1981 / © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

One of the interesting things about your exhibition is that it is sponsored by PNC Bank, which is in itself a commentary of a kind on the relationship between business and art.

When I got a call from Max Anderson, our director, asking if I would be interested in curating a show in conjunction with PNC bank and the Warhol Museum, my first reaction was a little bit hesitant. But I thought, "Warhol certainly wouldn't mind having a show sponsored by a bank. He would probably have really liked it." And I love the fact that Warhol had the corporation Andy Warhol Enterprises -- it has always stood out to me as a really fine example of Warhol as an entrepreneur -- and Andy loved money. So I though lets do a show about Andy loving money, but in a critical, engaged way.

Did they have any part in coming up with the show's conceit?

No, this is something that we pitched to them. And they loved it. I especially thought it was hilarious that for once we would be able to even flaunt a sponsor's name and logo in conjunction with the exhibition. Whenever we were creating collateral for the show I was able to say "don't forget the logo" and "make the logo bigger."

The exhibition catalogue shows Warhol as a shameless self-promoter, even appearing on Japanese film ads like the cliché of Bill Murray's character going to sell Japanese whiskey in "Lost in Translation."

That's perfect, right? But he was doing that from the beginning. Something we didn't have an image of in the catalogue but that was always in my mind in developing the show was the classified ad he put in the Village Voice in 1966 that said, "I will endorse with my name any of the following" and then it was just a list of all of the things he was happy to endorse, which included "anything." So he was a bit of a whore, as it were, from the beginning. One of the ideas that we have really tried to work against in this exhibition is that there was a turning point in Warhol's career -- this idea that before he was shot there was a certain integrity to his work and after a turning point it all dissipated and he became a servant to celebrities and society members. I don't believe that that is true. He even said later in his career, "I was always a commercial artist."

That is so interesting because that recent biography of him, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, ends when he was shot in 1968, essentially condensing the last two decades of his career into a few paragraphs, largely dismissing it as commercial work.

I know. It's a great book, it's excellently researched, has great material, but it just ends! He was shot in 1968 but he didn't die until 1987. It is really incredible that that perception persists -- I mean, it is really prevalent, especially, of that generation. This exhibition is one of several in the past few years that is re-examining his later work including the "Last Decade" show and "Pop Life." These other exhibitions are looking at his later work in a fresh light. But I feel sometimes that the members of Warhol's own generation, or the people who were there, were sometimes clouded in their judgment and unable to see the irony of his later work.

I think it is so interesting your catalogue opens with a picture of Warhol sitting behind a desk. I can't think of another artist, like that, sitting behind a desk. Even Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst wouldn't take that picture.

Oh, no. You have seen pictures of them at their desk in their studios, maybe sitting with desks or papers or tables behind them, or maybe at a computer, but not this -- in such an officious role! I love that photo. It hasn't been published very much, and it was really important to us to include it. There is actually another version of this photo that is backed up a little more and it shows that, to the right of the telephone, there is a TV facing him.

The essays in the catalogue present Warhol as this businessman sitting behind a desk, running Warhol Enterprises, concocting a new moneymaking scheme every day, wearing a tie, and flying by Concorde. And it certainly worked: the final valuation of his estate was $228 million.

That's correct, though I'm not sure exactly how the Warhol Museum came to that figure. I am pretty sure that it is the valuation of his work at the time of his death plus all of the other art work he collected, because he had quite a collection of decorative art and some work by other artists, as well. Also, it includes his real estate holdings.

So, just like any other CEO.

Exactly. In the exhibition we have a portfolio that says "Andrew Warhol Enterprises Inc." on the front and it sort of goes through the value of his estate in 1965, and lists artworks that he owned -- some small Rauschenberg works and other items. But he did amass quite a bit of wealth in his days. Even in the 50s, in the first decade of his career, he did amazingly well as a commercial artist. So he was very well off even before he became famous.

What was he like as a boss?

As a boss? Well, we interviewed Vincent Fremont in the catalog and that is one account of many accounts, but at a certain point in my research it became unhelpful to read the accounts of everyone who worked for him. The people who were very close to him seemed to love him, like Pat Hackett [Warhol's secretary]. While they had not an uncomplicated relationship with Warhol, they certainly had extreme fondness for him. But then you read accounts like Bob Colacello's "Holy Terror" and you see a different side but one that is cited often, the flip side of Andy Warhol, where while he could be incredibly encouraging to other people, to other employees, other artists, he was also pretty cruel in certain regards as well.

What fascinates me is that while he presents this image as a business man -- "the business artist" -- his own management of his affairs was much more like an artist. He hardly paid anyone except with drugs, or parties, or the occasional lunch money.

Part of Warhol's brilliance at an early age was getting people to help him for free. In the 50s he would have these coloring parties where he would invite his friends to Serendipity 3 to help him hand-color his blotted line drawings, and he had his mother help him as well. He certainly had paid assistants, too. All of his films made it look like people in the factory were just sitting around, but he was certainly very good at getting people to work for him for free, and I'm sure it was mutually beneficial. It turned from the "Factory" into the "Office", and his staff members grew as his life progressed. But he certainly did know how to run a business and get the most out of his employees.

Did they have health care? Or anything like that?

I don't know, but there is a great Warhol quote: "Employees made the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they are always tax deductible."

It is funny to think about how much of a chaotic mess his workplace was.

Well, you see the time capsules, and you get a small glimpse of his business life because the time capsules were basically his sweeping off his desk every so often and putting it in a box. And if you go to the Warhol Museum archives and you take a peek in those time capsules, it is really astounding the amount of stuff that almost anyone would throw away that Warhol kept.

What stands out in your memory?

Ticket stubs, taxi receipts, small notes about his finances. If you look in his diaries, you will see that the "Andy Warhol Diaries" actually originated because his accountant wanted him to track his daily expenses, and then it expanded from there. But it will say "taxi, 3 dollars" and so on. That is in the "Andy Warhol Diaries" that Pat edited. He would call her in the mornings and she would transcribe his day-to-day activities for many years. And some of them... I mean, it's funny, but pretty tedious at a certain point. He will say who he went out with the night before, who was at Studio 54, et cetera. They also found in the time capsules over a thousand dollars in cash that he just stuck in one of the boxes. I tried to get that for the show, actually, but I think they gave it to the Warhol Foundation.

Continued...

Visit "The Business Artist: How Andy Warhol Turned a Love of Money Into a $228 Million Art Career" on ARTINFO for the rest of Andrew Goldstein's interview with IMA curator Sarah Urist Green about the themes in her probing exhibition, including a discussion of Warhol's role as Factory foreman, his money paintings, and his vulgarity, and to see a slide show of Andy Warhol's most famous money-making works.

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