Another Monday

It's Monday again - the beginning of another week.  We're going through "goal setting" at work and I'm strangely invigorated.  Probably because I actually have some decent ideas and I've been repeatedly assured that this time (no, really - this time) our personal goals are going to be tied to our performance bonus.  We've had a bonus of the past few years and it's supposed to be a performance bonus, but it hasn't really reflected my performance.  Or the performance of my co-workers, or our office.  It's reflected the performance of the company as a whole, which has been good, but that's not really point.  If it's supposed to help motivate me to do better, somehow it needs to be tied to my performance.  Anyway, after many years of change we're getting to a more standardized process that will measure performance.  Better performance will result in bigger bonus, as it should be.  Unlike the financial companies where the guys who did worse than anyone every did still got money for doing so poorly.  I suspect if you add the losses of everyone that has ever lost money in the financial industry and compare it to this one year, this year's would be bigger.  And yet they got paid lots of money for it.  I've heard it said that the public doesn't understand that it is common industry practice to pay a modest "stipend" known as salary, with most compensation arriving in the form of a bonus.  It sounds good, but I haven't seen how much they are paid, but I bet they make 5 to 10 times the salary I do - plus bonuses.  The massive losses should have been setup so they have to pay back money to the company instead of receive.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Moving on to better economic news, President Obama finally moved decisively to deal with the automakers by asking GM CEO Rick Wagoner to step down.  I heard an analyst draw a parallel to a professional sports team saying that Wagoner didn't cause the problems, but when you "lose" as often as GM has recently, coaching changes need to be made.  At worst, Wagoner didn't move fast enough or decisively enough to turn around the giant boat known as GM.  At best, he was doing the things that GM needed to do become a great automaker again.  Regardless, the big deal is the costs of retired employees.  I think that may be too trite - GM promised a pension of a certain size and I believe that they are in trouble now because they can't keep up with the pension payments.  I think that's because they would "borrow" against the pension by deferring some of the payments.  Defer long enough and soon you're where we are now.  The pension and health costs are a huge chunk of every car sold by GM.  I hope that GM can stay afloat as I'm encouraged by some of their upcoming products like the Volt.

The point of that rambling was that it is good to see the government stepping up and doing something at this point.  Hopefully they will start doing that in the financial areas where they hold more shares or gave more money.  Frankly this would be a good time to make some corporate governance changes all over - maybe regulatory changes is a better phrase.  There is a problem with publicly traded companies: they have to maximize profit.  The way things go, companies are obligated to produce the maximum short-term gains to satisfy the market.  If the regulations were altered to allow for companies to keep investing in themselves - to be able to legally make choices of long-term growth over short-term profits - I think we'd see a better economy.   The emphasis on constant growth - always bigger, with bigger returns obligating larger following returns - leads us down this rat-hole of boom then bust.  This is just a vague idea at this point, no really suggestions or plans.  I'll try and revisit this idea later.