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

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (28217)	1/30/2003 11:14:09 AM
From: Stock Farmer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Aaah, so now that I've exercised Options (again) and cleaned up after some of his little puts we can return to the dialogue. I have no difficulty with Irwin Jacobs being a billionaire from the $30 billion in value. I have difficulty conceiving of you having any difficulty with Dr IJ, so I guess we're even. But what if he was some ordinary mere mortal with more charisma than scruples? Or what if he was a 40-billionaire, think you'd have a few guilty twinges? What if he was puppet-guy, trotted out as a spokesman for his company but wielding no real power over the firm which is being swept up in a tide of its own making? Or what if keeping him and his cronies at the helm means handing to them more wealth in each year than the company generates in that year? With no end in sight? What about the great Maestro? Surely he deserves a slice of the action too. Percentage wise he's WAY behind in the "taking home some of what you create" lineup. Me, I have no difficulty spending boodles of money on management. Heck, every good manager I know draws a salary and a good one at that (except those currently drawing severance or government assistance, that is). And shareholders pay for it all anyway, one way or the other. So I vote to just erase ALL wages from the books. Of any sort: options, cash, health plans, day-care, massage therapy, twinkies... whatever it costs to keep those creative people creative probably shouldn't count. Shareholders will just get all bent out of shape if they add it all up anyway. What we have now is just half measures. And we should expect more than half measures from our management teams. Particularly when we are paying them so mu...oops... um... particularly when they are so good. This sweeping reform will have tremendous benefits. Firstly, it will save lots of accounting bother and put this silly debate about options to bed. All that fussing will go away once and for all. And profits will soar immediately! Think of the benefit! The value of Silicon Valley stocks will go through the roof. So will houses in the Valley as the clever sparks in the Department of Financial Engineering everywhere suddenly discover that it's easy to attract talent when salaries have no upper limit. Thus those earning the wages can keep up with the Joneses even faster and faster, which will invariably trickle into the local economy and stimulate an entire series of multiplier effects. Stock prices outside the valley will also soar as these wages in excess of cost of living are re-invested for early retirement. Thereby solving at one go two nasty pending problems: under-funded pension plans and looming retirement of boomers. At least on paper. And thus pushing them so far below the radar of the public's eye that front page news can once again focus on what some guy did with his cigar and where some one-time sports hero is driving his bronco... Imagination can not comprehend how cool this might be. We'd have such a bull run in stocks it would make the go-go boom-boom bubble days look like a blip. And that would be good. Yes?