{"id":1419,"date":"2009-06-09T19:41:52","date_gmt":"2009-06-10T03:41:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=1419"},"modified":"2009-06-09T20:01:51","modified_gmt":"2009-06-10T04:01:51","slug":"obamas-bank-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/obamas-bank-dilemma\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama’s bank dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, you’ve played the populist card on executive compensation, Mr. President.\u00a0 You used it to provide cover for the mammoth, Democratic-payback-mondo-porkfest called the “Stimulus Package.”\u00a0 You used $500K to buy $787B<\/a>.\u00a0 Well played, sir.\u00a0 But now that card is on the table.\u00a0 You can’t just pick it up again.<\/p>\n

So, now we all have a bunch of silly-assed compensation rules<\/a> that anyone could have predicted would create retention risk at American public banks.\u00a0 Sure, most people were saying, “Screw ’em.\u00a0 Where else could they go<\/a>?” but we knew otherwise<\/a>, didn’t we BO?\u00a0 We knew that any bank under TARP would chafe at the pay restrictions, in part because it put them at a competitive disadvantage.\u00a0 We knew that once you set some of the banks free, they would poach the others into submission, those big wounded banks still trapped under TARP, with all that taxpayer investment.\u00a0 Poof.<\/p>\n

So here we are, on the eve of a TARP repayment by some banks that you have done everything to slow.\u00a0 But that part of the game is finally up.\u00a0 Now, what do you do?<\/p>\n

Of course.\u00a0 You try to maintain some uniformity on the pay restrictions across all the banks, in and out of TARP.\u00a0 So, you’re forced to loosen up some of the restrictions<\/a> on the remaining TARP banks while imposing new ones on the soon-to-be non-TARP banks.\u00a0 I know where you’re coming from, Mr. President.<\/p>\n

Don’t worry, your secret appears safe, for now.\u00a0 The media has not a clue about your strategy or its motivation.\u00a0 Most of them are still at the “where else can they go?” stage.\u00a0 And the regular readers of this blog are plenty smart enough, but there’s only a few dozen of them–not enough to really alert the media.\u00a0 So, don’t worry.\u00a0 Do what you have to do.\u00a0 It’s all you can do, isn’t it Mr. President, as political choices lead to economic consequences that prompt more political choices…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, you’ve played the populist card on executive compensation, Mr. President.\u00a0 You used it to provide cover for the mammoth, Democratic-payback-mondo-porkfest called the “Stimulus Package.”\u00a0 You used $500K to buy $787B.\u00a0 Well played, sir.\u00a0 But now that card is on the table.\u00a0 You can’t just pick it up again. So, now we all have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-executive-compensation","category-invisible-trade-offs","category-reporting-on-pay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1419"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1421,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions\/1421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}