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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (29911)	11/26/2008 8:41:29 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

"But it takes corrupt, lying politicians and 'captive' regulators --- over many years --- to allow corporations to get away with vastly under-funding their pension plans.... " This gets into accounting which is one area I have previously recognised as outside of your area of expertise. It however is relatively straight forward. They used GAAP. Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures allows a company to use current assets in a plan to determine the amount required to add. When plan assets exceed the actuarially computed amount required then no additional contribution is required. Sustained bull markets increase corporate profitability by reducing pension expense.

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (29911)	11/26/2008 9:06:01 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

all of our major corporations involved in global trade suffer from the COMPETITIVE DISADVANTAGE of having to shoulder all of their health care costs themselves Since the countries that think substandard medical care is oky doky IF government provides it are the majority in the WTO they have ruled that you are wrong. There is no competitive advantage. We need to apply a tariff to all goods from these countries. Of course that would probably ignite a world wide tariff war and have the same effect on te world economy that Smoot Hawley did. I'm pretty sure that PRAGMATISM will out in due course. From a partisan hack like Obama wo surrounds himself with yes hacks? Your confidence exceeds my own. If there have been frauds perpetrated here (& I believe that there have, and across MANY other industries as well)... then it is the LEGAL AUTHORITIES who are responsible for allowing them to persist. IO explained in my previous post that there was no fraud just manipulation of accounting rules. Fraud is wat Fannie and Freddie did under the leadership of Obama advisors Franklin Reines and Jaime Gorelick.