Goldman Sachs stunned many in the Wall Street community Friday by awarding chief executive Lloyd Blankfein $9 million as his year-end bonus, far less than many were anticipating, and none of it in cash.
It was in restricted stock.
My guess is that there are some back channel deals, and the whole idea of a “just $9 million” being an exercise in frugality is odd, but he recognizes that there is a very real problem, and he is taking actions to immunize himself, as well as the vampire squid,* from some of the treats of regulatory and legislative action, so credit where is due.
My guess would be is that he got some security and buy-out guarantees that are worth a lot more, in exchange, but those are crafted so as not to show up headline.
Additionally, this may be a big “f%$# you” to his competitors, who now have to explain why they got bigger bonuses with less performance.
*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
Note that this is more of a demonstrator than anything else, and by way of comparison, the BAE EAP, the demonstator for the Eurofighter Typhoon, first flew in August 1986, but entered service in August 2003, a 17 year lag.
To the degree that I can get a look at the cockpit arrangement, and it’s a couple of times that I have paused the videos (below), it appears that the canopy has not gotten any sort of stealth treatment yet.
There also appears to be a fair amount of edge alignment.
This, along with the visible smoke trails from engines, implies to me that this is more a demonstrator than a prototype
The the 2nd video makes that fairly clear that they are staying with the straight inlets and widely spaced inlets of the Flanker and Fulcrum, , so I’m not sure how they keep RCS down. There might be radar blockers in the inlets.
Interesting, they retain the widely spaced straight through inlets of the Flanker and Forger. I wonder how they reduce the RCS, perhaps radar blockers in the inlets.
Also, it appears that agility is a larger priority, as it has a cranked delta wing, which tends to improve nose authority at higher angles of attack.
I wonder if they are operating under the assumption that sensor fusion and increased processing power will mitigate stealth going forward, or they may have decided that lowering RCS to improve jamming efficiency was a more economical path forward than going with extreme stealth.
Jim Cramer claimed that the Scott Brown victory drove markets up on Tuesday, but the markets closed before the polls did, but stocks actually fell when they got the news, on Wednesday.
Scroll forward to about 7:50 for complete pwn463 (ownage), or hell, just watch the whole thing, it’s Jon Stewart:
Considering the fact that casualties in earth quakes are buildings collapsing on people, and this fact, when juxtaposed with the abysmal quality of construction in Haiti, casualties will no doubt be high.
”This judge has basically announced a death sentence for all of us who help women,” said Dr. Warren Hern of Boulder, Colo., a longtime friend of Tiller who also performs late-term abortions. ”That is the effect of the ruling.”
Dr. Hern is 100% correct
The facts of the case are not in dispute: On a balmy Sunday morning, Roeder got up from a pew at Wichita’s Reformation Lutheran Church at the start of services and walked to the foyer, where Tiller and a fellow usher were chatting around a table. Wordlessly, he pressed the barrel of a .22-caliber handgun to Tiller’s forehead and pulled the trigger.
Prosecutors charged Roeder with first-degree murder, and the 51-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., later admitted to reporters and in a court filing that he killed Tiller. The prosecution stands ready with more than 250 prospective witnesses to prove it.
But what had been expected to be a simple trial was altered Friday when Sedgwick County Judge Warren Wilbert decided he would allow Roeder to build a defense case calling for a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter because he sincerely believed the May 31 slaying would save unborn children.
This is bullsh#@, and my guess is that this is an artifact of one of two things:
The anti-abortion terrorists have one of their own on the bench in Sedgwick County, Kansas.
This judge thinks that he’s going to be able to clarify things properly to a jury, which would make them understand the Kansas statute’s concept of, “”an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force.”
In either case this is not a clusterf%$#, but we won’t see the Obama DoJ getting involved in the Civil Rights area, they have already, “declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation.”
Obama has always been lukewarm on abortion rights, and now we get to see just how lukewarm he is.
The underoos bomber was not being soft on terrorists, but if the DoJ stays out of this, it’s giving aid and comfort to terrorists.
Dubai’s housing rout sent prices down 52 percent in the past year, prompting some homeowners to abandon their cars and mortgage payments and flee the country. Not one received a foreclosure notice.
Until now.
Barclays Plc won the sheikdom’s first foreclosure cases in court, clearing the way for lenders holding about $16 billion of Dubai home loans to take action when borrowers don’t pay. Islamic lender Tamweel PJSC, the emirate’s biggest mortgage bank, has several of its own foreclosure claims pending and estimates about 3 percent of its mortgages are in default.
People have been driving their cars to the airport and fleeing, they’ve been throwing people in Debtors’ Prisons, and they just had their 1st foreclosure?
Any relationship between Dubai, and by extension the UAE, and perhaps most of the petro-Kleptocracies to a modern financial or court system is purely coincidental.
I’d also note that any lender that claims that only 3% of its mortgages in Dubai are in default is lying.
On the good side, the F-35B, specifically air frame BF-01, has finally engaged the lift fan in flight, and everything was, as the flight test people say, “Nominal”:
The Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II stealth fighter engages its short takeoff/vertical landing propulsion system in flight for the first time, near Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., on Jan. 7. F-35 Lead STOVL Pilot Graham Tomlinson said afterward that the aircraft flew smoothly with the STOVL system engaged and was very easy to control.”
This is a good thing, though it is somewhat behind schedule, and Lockheed-Martin is thinks that it is necessary to add planes to the test program, so as to reduce the test schedule slippage from 2 years (!) to 6 months:
Lockheed Martin Corp. may add an aircraft-carrier model to a group of F-35 test planes as the company works to limit delays on the fighter jets to six months or less instead of the two-plus years expected by the Pentagon.
I’m not sure that this would help though, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has just ordered a delay in deliveries of the aircraft:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a delay in the Lockheed Martin Corp. F-35 program, cutting the Pentagon’s planned purchases by 10 aircraft in fiscal 2011 and a total of 122 through 2015, according to a budget document.
More than $2.8 billion that was budgeted earlier to buy the military’s next-generation fighter would instead be used to continue its development.
The delay is a setback for both Gates and Lockheed.
Setback is one way to put it.
So is clusterf%$#, death-spiral, shambles, snafu, and many other words I’m not in the mood to look up right now.
He’s leaving because he believes that it’s an uphill fight for him to win the election:
Polling in Connecticut suggested that Mr. Dodd had been hurt both by his association with Countrywide and by criticism for his role in legislation that appeared to clear the way for bonuses to be paid to executives of American International Group, the insurance firm that received a government bailout. (Last month, Kenneth R. Feinberg, who is charged with monitoring pay at companies that received taxpayer bailout funds, imposed pay limits for A.I.G.’s top executives.)
Republicans had viewed the Countrywide loans and the A.I.G. bonuses as potentially powerful weapons in the campaign.…………”
His spending a year in Iowa to run for President, and the Countrywide loan deal, which he was personally unaware of, hurt him, but what really hurt him was the AIG bonus scandal, where the Obama and His Evil Minions™, most notably Timothy Geithner, strong armed him into including a section in the relevant bill to allow the obscene bonuses, and then refused to admit the truth for weeks, leaving Dodd twisting in the wind. (See here, here, and here…………Note that the first link has my prediction that, “Geithner will be gone by June,” so much for my powers of prediction)
[on edit]I forgot to note that Connecticut Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal (D) has announced that he will run, and is now the presumptive favorite in the heavily blue Nutmeg State.
This is not a big surprise, first, they know that they won’t find work with Republicans, and second, they know that if they don’t quit, they won’t ever work for a Democratic Congressman again:
In a sternly worded statement, Griffith Chief of Staff Sharon Wheeler announced the exit of herself, along with legislative director Megan Swearingen, senior legislative assistant Brian Greer, legislative assistant Will Crain, press secretary Sean Magers, legislative correspondent Arinze Ifekauche, legislative correspondent Chase Chesser, staff assistant Mary Lou Hughston, congressional fellows Anjali Shah Kastorf and Leslee Oden and intern Andrew Menefee.
Griffith’s political consulting team has already parted ways with him since he announced over the holiday break that he would switch parties.
(emphasis mine)
The intern quit? The intern?
Dude, when your intern felt compelled to quit, you just got yourself seriously dissed.
Limbaugh, 58, suffered from chest pains, sources said. Limbaugh was sitting in a chair in his ninth-floor hotel room at the Kahala when emergency crews arrived, sources said. He told medical crews that he was taking medication for a back problem, sources said.
(emphasis mine)
Sounds like everyone’s favorite junkie is taking opiates again…………Whether or not this is a legitimate need or a relapse, I have no clue.
Say what you will, but it’s been clear from the start that what Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel have been interested in is Barack Obama signing a bill called “Healthcare Reform,” whether it helped ordinary people or not, and the Senate version fits the description to a “T”.
Obama has already made it clear that he wants the Senate bill to be the one out of committee, as shown by his full throated support of the tax on “Cadillac” insurance plan tax.
It means that, in addition to everything else, the bill is anti-union too, because protecting health care for their workers has been the Unions rear guard action for the past 28 years, ever since Reagan made union-busting cool with PATCO.
So, we will now allow insurance companies to levy a tax on ordinary Americans, and Rahmbama just loves that.
I had rather hoped that a few of the Senate Democrats, and those who caucus with them (I’m talking to you Bernie Sanders) would have had the guts to vote for cloture but against the bill, but no such luck.
At the rate things are going, we will get someone even more batsh%$ insane than George W. Bush in 2012, because there is no Republican on the national scene who is saner than he is right now.
There is a lot that I could say, but, on the theory that it’s classless to speak ill of the dead, let me add the following: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Well, he’s