The stock market is edging toward extremes of Great Depression and dot-com eras
The stock market is edging toward extremes of Great Depression and dot-com eras
Stock-market valuations, by one measure, have hit levels surpassed only a few times in the past, including the Great Depression and the dot-com bubble.
You're viewing a single thread.
I've lived through a whole dark age and three supposed end of days with the stock market.
I was working with Lehman Brothers when they went bankrupt.
Watching the collapse of a major investment bank from the inside is an interesting experience.
Still have one of their plexiglass desk cubes listing "Our values", which always brings an ironic smile to my face whenever I see it.
It didn't really collapse. Your CEO walked out the door with over 600 million dollars for a single year of work.
Both things can be true at the same time.
Also we wasn't "my" CEO as I was a freelancer working with them, not an employee, and even if I had been the latter it would still not have been "my" CEO because Lehman wasn't some kind of cooperative were workers got to chose upper management.
No they can't both be true. Companies that collapse do not have literal billions to give away. Corporate bankruptcy is not the same as personal bankruptcy. Personal bankruptcy you are going to spend the next 8 years eating ramen. Corporate bankruptcy is more like "I don't think I should have to work anymore but should still have money".
That's how it should be, not how it is.
Most institutions that go bankrupt have lots of assets, it's just that they have even more debts, and debt has various levels of seniority with the most senior debt payed first from whatever assets the company has, then if any assets are left the next more senior debt paid from them and so on until there are no more assets, and whomever was holding the more junior debt gets nothing (and stockholders are even more junior than any debt, so they usally get nothing).
There are tons of ways to take advantage of such a system (this being the fishy part) some of which are legal (so, even more fishy), and this being a large financial institution (who generally specialize in exactly playing the money game, including tax evasion, avoidance and all sorts of shennenigans) I'm almost sure the compensation for the CEO was made to be senior enough in the debt heirarchy that it ended up high enough that there was still money left from the sale of the company's assets after covering any debt that was even senior to it, to pay for it.
The Finance Industry is a complete total swamp, a politically endorsed swamp even, which is partly why I'm not working in the Industry anymore.
I pulled an old free frisbee out of a box of toys my mom had saved to find it was WaMu branded. Had a little chuckle at the free plastic frisbee outliving them.
Is that the one where the values were on the other side of a Venn diagram without anything in the overlap?
Bunch of text with even a Mission Statement on one side of the cube.