Monday, January 9, 2017

With the constant demand for content to fill the 24 hour news cycle, I wonder if anyone bothers to think about what they have written before they air it. Case in point: on either MSNBC or Bloomberg the other day, amid the wringing of hands about the decline of retail store sales among the big chains during the Christmas season, the crawling headline read "Amazon bucks the trend" I guess they were trying to indicate Amazon had a better season than guys like Macy's. Don't they get it yet, Amazon is the trend!

The headline of the article in the weekend WSJ read "Wells Revamps Pay After Scandal". In my naivete I thought "good" some of the board members and executives are finally going to held accountable for the fraud, misstated public reports, breach of fiduciary duty and probably a few thousand violations of the banking laws. What planet do I live on? The new pay scale was for low level employees at the branches. Why are the directors still in place, doesn't there have to be some accountability at the board level? What about the concept of "known or should have known".  This is reminiscent of the mortgage crisis in 2008, where the only guy personally charged with any wrong doing was a mortgage-backed salesman for Goldman Sachs who worked in Paris. Are you kidding me?

Great article on the CBS web site concerning a study of the housing bubble and subsequent melt down in 2008 here.