Talk Back

These are the personal views of Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission:

President Obama’s budget and deficit projections don’t reveal the sick state of U.S. finances, casting serious doubt on the safety of U.S. bonds.

Obama plans significant initiatives in health care, the environment, education, and jobs creation. Yet, the private sector, which must be taxed to finance government, is likely to grow slowly, resulting in too much federal borrowing.

To create jobs, businesses need customers and capital; without those they can’t sell what new employees make or buy equipment workers need.

Continue reading…

By Neal Lipschutz
A DOW JONES NEWSWIRES COLUMN

The first paragraph of The Wall Street Journal article uses the verb “pushed” to describe the decision by outgoing Bank of America Corp. (BAC) Chief Executive Kenneth D. Lewis to go without compensation for 2009.

The pusher, of course, was Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called pay czar put in place by the Obama administration to oversee pay practices at the companies receiving major federal assistance.

Imagine for a moment that this is not about Ken Lewis (a Bank of America spokesman, it should be noted, told the Journal Lewis  voluntarily agreed to go without 2009 pay), but instead about a theoretical CEO at a theoretical company.

The company is performing badly. The shareholders over a sustained amount of time have taken a big hit on their investments. There is significant if not uniform disenchantment with the CEO’s performance based on a number of objective and even subjective variables. Continue reading…

As President Obama unveils new compensation rules for financial institutions that accept government assistance, do you think the U.S. government should limit executive pay?