This time it’s upper executives at Washington Mutual, with CEO Kerry Killinger rating a $3.65 million on a base salary of $1 million bonus according to the board, after WaMu had lost $1.87 billion in q4 of 2007.
To Mr. Killinger’s credit, though not that of the board, he turned down his bonus in 2007.
It’s a rare thing when you can put the term together the term defense* procurement with humor in a coherent manner, but this press release from the Australian Department of Defence regarding the cancellation of the Seasprite Helicopter program, which was 5 years late, well over budget, and simply did not work:
SEASPRITE HELICOPTERS TO BE CANCELLED
In late 2007 the Rudd Labor Government initiated a review of the Seasprite helicopter project, in line with the promises made prior to the election.
After careful consideration of all the issues involved, the Government has decided that it intends to cancel the project. Discussions will be commenced immediately with the contractor in relation to the legal and financial arrangements to facilitate this.
The Government will announce the details of arrangements with the contractor once mutual agreement on these matters has been reached, subject to any confidentiality issues.
Minister for Defence Joel Fitzgibbon said the decision was not one taken easily, but the Government was left with little option.
“Today’s announcement demonstrates our determination to make tough decisions whenever required for the security of the nation and the safety and capability of our Defence Force,” Mr Fitzgibbon said.
“The decision taken by the Rudd Labor Government is one that should have been taken by the Leader of the Opposition, Brendan Nelson, when he had the opportunity last year, but his Government decided to put its own political interests ahead of the national interest. Consequently, the responsibility of cleaning up the mess they created falls to us,” Mr Fitzgibbon said.
To ensure the Navy maintains an effective naval aviation capability, the Government has decided on two measures. First, our interim approach will focus on improving the operational availability of the current Seahawk fleet. Second, the Government will investigate the planned replacement of the Seahawk during its White Paper deliberations.
“The new Government will continue to work through the long list of Defence capability nightmares it has inherited from the former government. We are determined to ensure that the Defence Force receives the capability it needs, and Australian taxpayers receive value for their money,” Mr Fitzgibbon said.
(Emphasis mine)
*DefenCe for those down in Oz.
This is just bloody unbelievable.
Each time that I think that Bush and His Evil Minions™ can’t do any worse, they exceed my lowest expectations.
No, not for president, for their respective congressional seats. It was not close for either.
Remember it wasn’t just presidents on the ballot in Ohio and Texas.
Yes, I know misleading hed.
From Crooks and Liars:
Given the complexities of the process, it’s even possible, hard as it may be to believe, that when the dust settles on the March 4 contests, Obama may have lost three out of four contests, and managed to gain delegates — proving, once again, that this is a very silly process in need of reform.
The New York Times reports on the case of a British Travel Agent living in Spain, who had his domain names seized by his US domain registrar at the request of the Treasury Department.
They felt that he, “helped Americans evade restrictions on travel to Cuba”, so they seized the sites, including one about Earnest Hemingway, and two in Italian and French.
A whois shows that the Pirate Bay uses Key-Systems GmbH?
Perhaps they are in a country of laws, and not men.
Members of the Senate Banking committee just grilled regulators and accused them of being, “Asleep at the switch” on the housing debacle.
One wonders why it appears that Alan Greenspan’s name never came up. He was aggressively working towards dismantling financial protections and ignoring basic regulations during his tenure at the Fed, pausing only to bail out fat cat investors when they got into trouble.
With her victories in Ohio and Texas, Hillary Clinton is in through Pennsylvania, which means that he national political press is descending on your state like flies on……bad analogy, I do not mean to insult the great commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I used to live there.
How about Piranhas on a swimming cow…Better.
That being said, I have two thoughts, first that this is good, not bad, for the Democrats, the only major news that McCain can get from now until the Democratic nominee is decided is going to be bad news (the lobbyist thing and the bigot Hagee), while the Dems have a platform to put forward their ideas to an engaged publid.
My second thought is that I agree with Terry McCauliffe: Mark Penn should STFU. With every success, it’s Penn’s campaign, with every failure, he’s just an adviser.
I have to argue that his $10 million in fees has been money poorly spent.
McCain Sweeps it, he’s over the top for delegates.
Obama wins Vermont, Hillary wins Rhode Island, and CNN is calling Ohio for her.
Texas is too close to call, and I’m getting some sleep, for once.
So I’m reading an article about the vulnerabilities of Windows-based ATM machines.
Really, Really, Really, bad idea. When the BSOD* means that they empty your bank account, I’m less than enthused.
*Blue Screen of Death
Writing for The Hill, Markos Moulitsas, founder and proprietor of Daily Kos pens, “GOP’s flesh-eating zombie candidate.”
It’s a great title, and it is largely factually accurate, and this guy is contributing to the suffering of severe burn victims all over the country.
Go read it.
I bumped into him at a cafeteria at Gen Con in 1980, but never talked to him or anything.
He and Dave Arneson invented D&D, and ye,s I played, a lot, when I was younger.
I think that it’s clear that the lithium-ion batteries chosen by GM are superior to the standard NiMH, they are more efficient and lighter, but there are problems.
The article mentions overheating, but they actually heat up less in use.
The real problem is what is euphemistically called “rapid disassembly” in battery manufacturing*, which occurs when batteries overheat or are overcharged.
Basically because of the chemistry of a LiIon battery, these can cause dendrites, basically metal whiskers, to form between anode and cathode, shorting out the battery and discharging all of its energy in a matter of seconds.
Think about the Dell exploding laptops on crack. It looks a lot like a flare going off.
Of course, this would not be a problem with a properly designed system, but we are talking about General Motors, the folks who used the same aluminum alloy as Mercedes Benz for its Vega engine, but but chose a coolant that corroded aluminum.
I’d wait for at least the 3rd model year before buying.
*I worked for a battery manufacturer for a while.†
†And now my regular readers, both of them, are wondering if there is any field of endeavor where I haven’t worked. Well, yes. High finance. If I had worked on that, I’d have the money to spare for a domain name.
They are actually going to the Cayman islands on legitimate business…no…really…I mean it.
Congress had decided to go after tax havens, and they have sent GAO investigators, and they will be visiting the infamous Ugland House, corporate headquarters for 12,748 companies.
Good for Congress, and good for GAO, it’s investigative arm.
If the Republicans were in charge, this would never have happened, because they believe that, “only little people pay taxes.”
FWIW, offering bounties for tax cheats, as German investigators did with records of trusts in Lichtenstein, would be a very good thing.
The Scandinavian airline SAS: is saying that its MD-80s would still be cheaper to operate, even if the cost of fuel doubled.
It doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense, given that the cost of oil is at an all time high, until you look at this quote:
n its newly-released annual report SAS Group says the effect of capital costs means the MD-80 is SKr5-10 million ($0.8-1.6 million) more profitable to the carrier than newer aircraft.
Capital costs for the type are SKr20 million lower, more than offsetting the SKr10-15 million in higher fuel and maintenance costs.
…
n its newly-released annual report SAS Group says the effect of capital costs means the MD-80 is SKr5-10 million ($0.8-1.6 million) more profitable to the carrier than newer aircraft.
Capital costs for the type are SKr20 million lower, more than offsetting the SKr10-15 million in higher fuel and maintenance costs.
(emphasis mine)
This is interesting not from an aviation perspective, but from a larger economic one.
It implies one of two things:
The first reason is simply not credible. If it were, we’d all still be flying DC-3s, or at least upgrades 707s and DC-8s, since they take people to the same places just as fast.
That leaves reasons two or three, or reasons two and three.
From a macroeconomic standpoint, however, it’s reason 2, the cost of capital, that is most interesting.
This may very well be a major capital purchase that is being delayed because the capital markets have frozen up. That the increased risk premium that has resulted from the credit crunch simply make it too expensive to upgrade to better equipment.
That is how a credit crunch creates a recession, which makes the credit crunch worse.
I do not doubt that the A330 was technically superior.
The airframe and avionics are newer, the manufacturing techniques are more advanced, and the airframe is larger.
The reason I did not expect it to win was because of the USAF generals who wanted sweet retirement packages with Boeing, and the inevitable outrage from Congress.
Well, the sh%$ storm is here, care of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex.
You can get a good Cliff Notes version of what is going on here.
Basically, a few years back, Boeing offered a lease deal which was really pretty awful. This deal was negotiated by a Pentagon official who was also negotiating with Boeing for a job as a VP.
John McCain looked at the deal, and smelled a rat, and for once, and it’s rare for him, he was right, so the contract was canceled, and a new one was put out for bid.
And now EADS has won with a clearly better plane, one that is already on order from a number of countries.
This won’t stop the poo from flying.
first, let’s start off by saying that Tom Toles is a bloody genius:
We have Citi on a path to cutting 30,000 jobs, and we have Dubai International Capital LLC, a sovereign wealth fund saying that losses will get worse, and they will need another infusion of capital.
FWIW, it was Abu Dhabi investors who just bailed them out a month or so ago, not Dubai.
In real estate, they’ve just discovered that
the real estate collapse is making first-time buyers less likely to buy.
In related news, water is wet, and the sky is blue.
In truth this is hardly surprising when even people like Ben Bernanke, who has done his best to avoid panicking the markets is saying that foreclosures will increase, and house prices will fall for a while yet.
Ratio of home ownership to rental costs are near a historic high, so why would someone want to buy into a depreciating asset?
Meanwhile, we are finding that the, “extra yields investors demand on bonds backed by assets from commercial mortgages to credit cards rose to records”, recently, despite the fed rate cuts, leading a senior managing director at an investment firm to quip, “People are calling it financial Ebola“.
Translated into language for ordinary people, this means that people are requiring a much higher markup on either the prime rate, or the Fed funds rate, before they make loans.
Yields on three-year, AAA rated credit-card bonds with floating rates rose to 75 basis points over the London interbank offered rate, up from 40 basis points at the start of the year, according to Deutsche Bank AG data. Spreads over three-year swap rates for three-year, AAA rated fixed-rate auto-loan securities rose to 140 basis points, up from 75 basis points. The average spread over U.S. Treasuries on AAA rated commercial-mortgage securities climbed to 364 basis points, from 167 basis points on Dec. 31, according to Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.
People are increasingly unwilling to lend money, and demanding higher returns, because they have no faith that it will be paid back.
Speaking of being paid back, Fremont General just defaulted on $3.15 billion in subprime mortgage loans that it sold a year ago.
The creditors are demanding immediate repayment, because Fremont’s “tangible net worth” (assets minus liabilities) have dropped below $250 million, meaning that they have violated the terms of the original sale.
Finally, we have Jon Moulton, the head of private equity firm Alchemy Partners, pretty much guaranteeing that, “There will be large private equity failures this year“. From the context he means both deals and firms.
Anne Althouse is batsh@$ insane. I mean really, really nuts.
H/T to Kevin Drum, who came up with a great headline.
The people just won one, where the Federal District Court just struck down Bayer’s patent on Yasmin, a contraceptive.
The patent, which expires in 2020, is on a formula for the compound drospirenone in which the particle size was reduced so it could be absorbed by the body more quickly before it is exposed to stomach acid. U.S. District Judge Peter Sheridan agreed with Barr that the decision to reduce the particle size would have been obvious to any researcher.
Hell, it’s obvious to any cook too.
Why else would they sell powdered sugar. Smaller particles dissolve more quickly.
Judith Regan, the woman who engaged in an affair with Bernie Kerik in the in an apartment overlooking ground zero, an apartment that was intended for use by the rescue workers, has been sued by her lawyers for non-payment of fees.
They were the ones who represented her after she got canned by Rupert Murdoch.
I don’t have much to add except for personal Schadenfreude. I just don’t have enough snark in me today.