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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (25976)	12/11/2002 4:58:36 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Snow Job President Bush appoints yet another phony businessman, this time as treasury secretary. By Daniel Gross Slate Updated Tuesday, December 10, 2002, at 2:36 PM PT slate.msn.com <<...As a businessman, however, Snow was mostly a bust. He successfully lobbied to have CSX gain a huge chunk of Conrail but then botched the execution of the merger. He also managed to have Washington block a merger of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. and Canadian National Railway Co. and forestalled efforts by freight customers to obtain better bargaining terms. But all that didn't translate into much for shareholders. In the past decade, CSX's stock is off 17 percent while the S&P 500 is up 111 percent. Snow is leaving the company with more debt than it has had at any time in the past seven years. Today CSX has difficulty generating sufficient cash to meet all its obligations. And this is the man President Bush has hired to manage the nation's debt? As Jesse Eisinger sharply notes in today's Wall Street Journal: "Mr. Snow is clearly a guy who understands deficit spending." Snow was also a champ when it came to executive compensation. In 12 years, as CSX shareholders experienced minimal returns, Snow took home at least $50 million. In 1996, he borrowed $25 million in company funds to buy stock. But when shares fell sharply, the company undid the loan in 2000. (So much for risk-taking.) Last year, when CSX underperformed all its railroad peers, he was paid $10.1 million. And he's not done. As the company's most recent proxy reads: "Mr. Snow will be provided with certain employee benefits and perquisites including office space and secretarial support, maintenance of country club memberships, executive physicals, discounts at The Greenbrier, and use of private aircraft for the remainder of his life." Snow may yet prove a brilliant treasury secretary. After all, the skills required are as much diplomatic and bureaucratic as they are managerial. But his elevation to the high-profile post, and the appointment of a stand-out like Donaldson to a second-tier position like the SEC, show the relative ascendancy of the access capitalists in the Bush administration and in the Republican Party generally. That may be why the markets regard the recent appointments as one step forward, two steps back...>>