Masters of the Universe category archive

Via C&L.

Two failures for the price of one. Wave buh-bye to:

First Community Bank of Southwest Florida, Fort Myers, Florida, also operating as
Community Bank of Cape Coral, Cape Coral, Florida

We are living in a corporate kleptocracy.

First they came for your pensions and left you with IRAs (by the way, how’s that working out for you?)

Now they are back for your IRAs.

Via C&L.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Via Noz.

A true believer tries to bring Ayn Rand’s objectivism to life in managing Sears and Kmart, with results easily predicted by anyone who is not in the spell of Ayn Rand.

It seems to have been, indeed, a searing failure.

A nugget, from MarketWatch:

An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.

Instead, the divisions turned against each other—and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that’s ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.

Do read the rest.

Via Sampler, an image site. Some images NSFW.

Bonuses for stealing homes.

And this surprises you how?

MarketWatch reporters conducted a series of in-depth interviews with ex–investment brokers and others who lost their trading licenses and are either in prison serving multiyear sentences or have done their time in the slammer and now advise others on what not to do.

The results were discouraging.

MarketWatch found that insider trading may be one of the most common crimes on Wall Street and one of the least prosecuted. And that was only the beginning. MarketWatch discovered that the problem for retail investors goes far beyond a failure of regulators to identify insider-trading violations.

Andrea Straub issued a statement through Philadelphia attorney George Bochetto saying that her position with a local Prudential Fox & Roach office was terminated on Wednesday.

Straub, 34, and her husband, Jonathan, were accused of disorderly conduct and harassment, after surveillance video surfaced allegedly implicating them in a scheme to hamper the sale of a neighbor’s home. The video shows someone tossing dead mice and snakes on a next-door-neighbor’s driveway. The video also showed tree branches being cut down and ‘For Sale’ signs being kicked down.

It’s quite a tony area where such hijinks at least used to be Just. Not. Done.

When I lived in Narberth three decades ago, I used to cross over into Merion to jog or bicycle and I distinctly remember Booth Lane. It’s an attractive area with streets that are wide, mostly flat, and relatively lightly traveled, except when the servants are funning errands for the lords and ladies of the manse.

Innovations in theft “financial products.”

Ups and downs.

The “median,” however, doesn’t tell the whole story when it comes to pay versus performance. For example, at the top of the pay package list was Lawrence Ellison, founder and CEO of software maker Oracle, who received total compensation of $96.2 million last year. His pay was up 24 percent, but the company’s shareholders saw a negative 22 percent return for the fiscal year ended in May, according to the NYT report.

More at the link.

Via C&L, which has a summary.

Via C&L.

Just where did that grocery item come from, anyway?

That’s become a bit of an issue in these parts since major stockholders in Smithfield Foods forced its sale to a Chinese firm so they could cash in on their major stockholdings. The issue strikes close to home because iffy Chinese industrial and consumer safety practices have struck (close to) homes here before.

Anyhoo, the answer to the question at the beginning is, “Good luck, suckers.”

Here’s a nugget from an excellent column in my local rag.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines require that products list a “responsible party,” said Donnell Scott, technical manager of food labeling for AIB International, a research and consulting firm in Manhattan, Kan., that assists the food industry with government regulations.

“It’s who’s going to take responsibility for that product,” she said, but not necessarily the entity that controls that responsible party.

Boxes of the cereal Weetabix, originally a British brand, say it is “manufactured by The Weetabix Food Co. Ltd.” in Ontario, Canada, and identify it as a “product of Canada.” Nowhere does it mention Bright Food, the Chinese company that bought Weetabix last year.

Read the rest.