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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SilentZ who wrote (456152)	2/13/2009 10:40:18 AM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574883

i read it. it resonates. It's wrong. You distort the talent pool if you selectively restrict salaries in a particular industry. Same on the upside when the wallst geniuses were getting unholy compensation. Its all about free flow of capital. Problem is not what they earn but what they create and sell that passed thru the system without checks or balances. If someone said no to the securitization and subprime, folks who came up with these schemes would never have made big bucks. The perceived unfairness here and it is real is something we have to live with in order to attract the best folks to banking now when they are needed most. Having said that, we should fire the remaining john thains of the world if they are getting fed funds with no parachutes.

To: SilentZ who wrote (456152)	2/13/2009 2:01:59 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574883

And so too with the rich. The problem for the bankers on $500,000 isn't that they can't feed their families but that they lose their positional status. And good. Screw 'em. Enjoy Hoboken. As for the rest of us, it's actually a good thing if the top falls a bit and the arms race eases. If a sizable chunk of the New York housing stock can no longer be aimed at a class of people who think $500,000 poverty wages, then housing stock will be cheaper. The more troubling question, though, is what happens to the new New York, which was largely built and sustained atop the tax revenues provided by Wall Street. The above is a bit of stretch. While I am the first to agree that Wall Street execs don't have to live on the Upper West Side.....Brooklyn or Hoboken will do....., cutting their salaries will not bring down the cost of living in Manhattan. They are the chicken, not the egg; the tail, not the dog. Manhattan is expensive because it is an island where land is dear. And it is the cost of the land that wags the tail. Land costs would be more like Chicago or Los Angeles...still expensive but not out of this world expensive.........if Manhattan was not an island. You see the nature of the effect once you get off the island. Land is much cheaper in Queens, Brooklyn and Hoboken. Its the cost of the land that forced Manhattan to go hi rise. That worked for a while but then it didn't. The land became even more expensive. Then there began a decentralization of the finance industry to the suburbs and other American cities. That didn't work too well either. Of course, that in no way justifies million dollar+ bonuses and the current excesses on Wall St. Just an explanation as to why Manhattan is so expensive.

To: SilentZ who wrote (456152)	2/16/2009 7:29:12 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574883

The rich making less would exert (and presumably has been exerting) downward pressure on prices in New York. OTOH all of those high priced jobs, funneled a lot of money in to New York in multiple ways. The decline of wall street (while probably overall a good thing since it had gotten too bloated) is unlikely to be good for New Yorkers, even ones that didn't have Wall Street jobs, or who generally where not very wealthy.

To: SilentZ who wrote (456152)	2/17/2009 2:37:30 AM
From: Tenchusatsu	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574883

Z, a classic example of how relativism is affecting the mentality of Americans: > Would you rather live in a land where you had a 4,000-square-foot house and everyone else had a 6,000-square-foot house, or one in which you had a 3,000-square-foot house and everyone else had a 2,000-square-foot house? Given this choice, studies show that most respondents pick the latter. They'd rather have less home in absolute terms if it means more home in relative terms. That makes housing a positional good. So what's the author's solution? Feed into the mentality by using government to steal from the rich. Don't you see a problem with that? Tenchusatsu