Posted on 10/26/2009 5:33:11 AM PDT by markomalley
BILLIONAIRE investor George Soros at the weekend became the latest high-profile financier to wade into the bonus debate as he claimed the backlash against banking fat cats on lucrative pay deals is justified.
Speaking in an interview about large profits reported in recent weeks by Wall Street’s biggest banks, Soros said: “Those earnings are not the achievement of risk-takers. These are gifts, hidden gifts from the government, so I don’t think that those monies should be used to pay bonuses.”
He added: “There’s a resentment which I think is justified.”
Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, also said in the Financial Times interview that the economy would benefit from remuneration caps at banks driving talented risk-takers into the hedge fund industry.
“That would push risk-takers who are good at taking risks out of Goldman Sachs into hedge funds, where they actually belong, because hedge funds take risks with their own capital, not with deposits [or] with government guarantees,” he said.
Goldman Sachs led the pack of US bank giants recently as strength in fixed income boosted its third quarter earnings fourfold to $3.2bn (£1.96bn).
If we’re going to take back bonus pay, we should start with Franklin Raines.
It isn't often that I agree with Soros, but these are exactly the things I've been saying about this whole set-up. We are providing TARP-ed financial institutions with zero cost of funds, at an eventual (and heavy) cost to America's balance sheet, when their speculative investments collapse. Capping executive pay will drive them to private institutions where they can gamble with their own (and private investor) money, not ours - without the benefit of interest-free loans from Joe Taxpayer.
He’z playing good cop bad cop.
Soro’s IS part of the problem.
This from one of the richest men in the world. His hypocrisy knows no limits! How about if you return all the billions you pillaged from the people of England and the people of Indonesia, you clown! Geez.
I’m angry that George Soros is rich and still walking around. How’s that?
I would agree if I didn't remember how the USG held a gun to a lot of these companies' heads and forced them to take TARP. In addition, USG policies on lending forced a lot of these issues in the first place.
Having been in the investment banking industry for a career, I can assure you that if senior management could get away by NOT paying bonuses, they would cut them ASAP.
The payment of bonuses is purely a matter of competition. Firms pay them to guys and gals who generate investment banking fees or trading profits (revenue) and without those guys and gals...no revenue.
It is my understanding that Soros operates under a different principal. He prefers operating "beneath the table." By that I mean that Soros is said to prefer laundering money for drug dealers, trading securities on ill-gotten intelligence (insider trading), and rigging the political system.
Given that Soros is devoid of morals, I can understand why he would hate the capitalist system, a system that, when operating at its best, rewards pure merit...and prunes itself of cheats like Soros.
Soros is not a businessman, he is only an opportunistic criminal.
But, of course, he did buy an American Presidency...so he is indeed a very successful criminal!
Here’s the thing: I *AM* angry about several of these bonus-pay cases. It’s outrageous that these guys make tens of millions more when their high-risk strategies succeed, but millions more when they fail.
But you know what? That’s for the stock holders, bond-holders, bankers, and in some cases even customers to worry about, not the federal government. Republicans can’t fall into the trap of applauding every thing that angers liberals. Instead, we have to teach angry people a better way of responding to crap like this.
And by the way, I’m not THAT angry. One thing that also gets lost in this (thanks to the Hollywood News Media) is that this sort of executive compensation pales in comparison to crappy actors (Tom Cruise, etc.), third-string Yankee relief pitchers (and I say that as a Yankees fan), etc. Why shouldn’t we be angry that actors get paid millions to right socially corrosive, nihilistic, anti-American crap?
Or, if you really want to get angry, that “non-profit” executives also rake in millions?
Soros should be delivered to Korea ~ end of story.
Soros has a special place in hell. No doubt he prays each and every day that there is no such place.
So what did Soros do to Korea?
“outrageous that these guys make tens of millions”
No, it’s not. Western civilization is built on the legality of contracts. Without that, you’d have nothing but a petty islamo-african banana republic.
People earn what they can. It’s called freedom. It’s AWESOME.
I think the bonus pay being given to heads of companies that took billions of dollars in tax money, including my own, are outrageous. I think they should have to give back my tax money first.
But I don’t think the government should have any say in it. I can boycott the companies, but other than getting back what I gave the companies in tax dollars, I say leave them alone, and let them do what they want.
I think Ben and Jerry’s is outrageous for supporting nationalized health care, but I don’t expect someone to pass a law to punish them for it.
If it’s in their contract, then they absolutely must be paid their bonuses. But then it’s the terms of the contract which are outrageous. Or it’s ridiculous to call them bonuses, maybe? (”And if you don’t actually get caught in bed with an underage, dead, male prostitute while buying 10 billion shares of pets.com, you’ll get a $50 million bonus... wait, legal says we can’t discriminate against gays, pedophiles, ‘adult entertainers’ or puppets, so scratch that clause.”)
Bank of America had Countrywide and Merrill foisted on it. Banks that are not in trouble are free to withdraw any time they want to. The real problem with TARP isn't the (relatively small) face amount of the money they borrowed - it's that anyone in the program can borrow all the money they want from the Treasury at a near zero interest rate (0.15%). Once they leave, they lose that source of funding and are in fact at a disadvantage, relative to banks still on TARP. Everybody stays in because it's unclear what they have to lose by hanging on to free money. Salary caps give execs something to lose - the huge bonuses they've come to regard as their right. As far as I'm concerned they have the right to pay themselves whatever they want - once they're no longer borrowing at zero interest rates from Uncle Sam. Think of salary caps as means-testing. If the banks have enough money to pay execs whatever they want, they have enough money to get off TARP.
If anger about CEO bonuses is justified, imagine the anger that should be directed towards billion dollar marxists who sold out Jews to the NAZI death machine during WWII.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Soros.
One thing you have to hand this malevolent devil—he tells the truth as he sees it. Satan may be the Prince of Lies, but his servant George Soros is too vain to lie.
You know, once you study Soros, you’ll know how your righteous anger amuses and delights him. I’m not saying your anger is unjustified, it’s just that most people do not have a clue as to how destructive this man really is. He’s not ashamed of being a Nazi collaborator.
Has that been thoroughly debunked?
SOROS. Never show your treasonous face around fly over country.You bank run bastard!( Sept 18 2008).
When the dollar fails, worthless properties will be up for grabs. Guess who's trained to confiscate properties? Read on.
EXCERPT "60 Minutes:" Soros admits he helped in the confiscation of Jewish properties
On Dec. 20, 1998, in the midst of his murderous speculative rampage against the currencies of Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, and other targeted Asian nations, George Soros appeared on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes,” to explain and defend his behavior. Confronted by interviewer Steve Kroft about his experiences as a youth in Hungary, under the Nazi occupation, Soros freely admitted that he posed as the “adopted godson” of an official of the Nazi-occupation government, and helped in the confiscation of Jewish properties.
“Kroft: And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.
“Soros: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that’s when my character was made.
“Kroft: In what way?
“Soros: That one should think ahead. One should understand and anticipate events and when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a very personal experience of evil.
“Kroft: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
“Soros: Yes. Yes.
“Kroft: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews. “Soros: Yes. That’s right. Yes.
“Kroft: I mean that’s–that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
“Soros: Not–not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t–you don’t see the connection. But it was–it created no–no problem at all.
“Kroft: No feeling of guilt?
“Soros: No.
“Kroft: For example that, `I’m Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.’ None of that?
“Soros: Well, of course I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets–that if I weren’t there–of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would–would–would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the–whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. I had no role in taking away the property. So I had no sense of guilt.”
In an earlier television interview on the same subject, Soros was even more blunt about his role as a Nazi collaborator in the Holocaust. On April 15, 1993, Soros appeared on WNET-TV and declared, “When the Germans came in,” his father explained to him that, “This is a lawless occupation. The normal rules don’t apply. You have to forget how you behave in a normal society. This is an abnormal situation. And he [Soros's father] arranged for all of us to have false papers, everybody had a different arrangement. I was adopted by an official of the ministry of agriculture, whose job was to take over Jewish properties, so I actually went with him and we took possession of these large estates. That was my identity. So it’s a strange, very strange life. I was 14 at the time.”
================================================
Soros and - The "Hostile Takeover" of America -
As a matter of policy, Soros’s Quantum Fund has never accepted money from any American investors–in order to stay outside the reach of U.S. government investigation. He operates in such locales as the Dutch Antilles and Switzerland, yet much of his ill-gotten gains have been devoted to what some of his colleagues jokingly refer to as the “hostile takeover” of America.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Soros poured tens of millions of dollars into the campaign to legalize drugs–marijuana, heroin, and even crack cocaine. Soros refers to this as the “open society,” a lawless domain in which the only dictum is “harm reduction.” Soros’s dope legalization policies follow the model of the British East India Company, which waged two Opium Wars against China, during the 19th Century, to impose drug addiction on the population–for British profit and social control.
Soros’s latest hostile takeover target is the Democratic Party, and over the past eight years, Soros and a gang of fellow billionaires have come pretty close to achieving their goal. Starting soon after George W. Bush’s inauguration as President in early 2001, Soros poured a reported $18 million into passage of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law (Soros has continued to be a major donor to McCain’s Reform Institute), which placed a cap on “soft money” donations to the political parties, but left open a loophole, allowing nominally independent groups, referred to as “527s,” to take unlimited donations.
Soros began buying up the first generation of 527s, including outfits like MoveOn, ACT (America Coming Together), and Media Matters.
Soros also played a pivotal role in the 2004 candidacy of Howard Dean, who bombed as a Presidential candidate, but was rewarded for his access to Soros loot with the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, after John Kerry’s loss to George Bush in November 2004.
From that perch, Howard Dean waged a ruthless campaign against candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2008 primary elections–in tandem with Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a secretive billionaires club, that pooled its money to take over and run a “vast left-wing conspiracy” of 527s, PACs, and think tanks, that has replaced any Democratic Party constituency organization.
In the meantime, Soros found his legion of honest Bush-haters, in groups like MoveOn and ACT, to be useful tools in his further grimy speculative binges. Following the Kerry defeat, MoveOn, the Center for American Progress, and other progressive groups on the Soros dole, targeted Vice President Dick Cheney and Halliburton, the giant oil and defense contractor that was profitting mightily off Bush and Cheney’s Iraq imperial misadventure.
The barrage of attacks on Halliburton drove the company stock down, from a peak of $40 down to $26–at which point Soros began buying up Halliburton shares. Between the third quarter of 2005, and the fourth quarter of 2006, Soros bought 2 million shares of Halliburton, at an average price of just over $31.
As the media attacks on Halliburton–in part, driven by Soros’s anti-Bush/Cheney and anti-war zeal–died down by late 2006, Halliburton shares quickly rebounded. By early 2008, with Halliburton shares nearing $50, Soros had made an estimated $40 million in clear profit, making him one of the larger Bush-Cheney war profiteers.
I’d like this for my own archives—do you have a link?
Ah ... yes. It is just like these rigged investment markets, set up to operate with borrowed money and government guarantees when things fail. It is all just like war time pillaging, except that at least in open warfare, you can see who the enemy is.
Great sources there, thanks for posting them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.