Tell It To Al

The Securities and Exchange Commission gets plenty of tips for free that it never even acts upon, but now it’s going to pay whistleblowers hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars for information leading to penalties.

It’s hard to believe paying for tips is going to make the agency any more effective.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

Death and taxes are inevitable. Prison need not be.

Some people will do anything to get out of paying taxes – even turning to cockamamie schemes that can only end up in court.

Paul M. Daugerdas, who created and marketed what the IRS calls abusive tax shelters, was convicted of fraud and is now headed to prison.

Click here to read my column on Daugerdas on MarketWatch.

You try running a bank with operations in 60 countries and $2.2 trillion in assets and see if all the people love you.

Jamie Dimon, CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co., rose to the top while a lot of other giant banks raced to the bottom. He’s someone who has been paid to succeed rather than fail, and yet he still faces the animus aimed at the banking industry.

Dimon talked about it during a recent speech in Denver. Click here to read my column on Dimon.

Should Ronald McDonald be fired for making America fat?

Grass roots watchdog Corporate Accountability International thinks so.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal, where I take a stand for Ronald. I also talk about it with Matt Flener of Denver’s NBC affiliate, 9News. Click here to watch.

Ever get the urge to quit your job, max out your credit cards and chase your entrepreneurial bliss?

Alan Martin, founder of campusbooks.com doesn’t recommend it, but it worked out for him.

Click here to read column.

Should automakers be forced to build cars that deliver 60 miles per gallon?

Automakers have always fought fuel efficiency and emissions standards. But with gasoline around $4, nobody seems to objecting.

Click here to read column.

Remember that anti-trust case against Microsoft? Probably not, given Apple’s and Google’s success. The settlement expired quietly last week.

The government says it helped foster an environment for competition and innovation, but did it really? I talk about it on Denver’ NBC affiliate, 9News:

Jobs not coming back quickly enough? Housing market still in the dumps?

Maybe what the world needs now is a little more government-funded research.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said as much at a Conference on “New Building Blocks for Jobs and Economic Growth” in Washington, D.C. today. Kind of:

“Economists have identified some persuasive justifications for government policies to promote R&D activities,” Bernanke said. “In practice, we know less than we would like about which policies work best. A reasonable strategy for now may be to continue to use a mix of policies to support R&D while taking pains to encourage diverse and even competing approaches by the scientists and engineers receiving support.”

Or maybe we should research how to research.

“As someone who spends a lot of time monitoring the economy, let me put in a plug for more work on finding better ways to measure innovation, R&D activity, and intangible capital,” Bernanke said. “We will be more likely to promote innovative activity if we are able to measure it more effectively and document its role in economic growth.”

Click here to read Bernanke’s speech.

What would you like to see the government research?

How about researching what’s going to happen to the economy when the Fed ends its bond buying programs later this year, or is forced to raise interest rates?

Big oil is bagging big profits while  Americans are lining up for $4 gasoline and Uncle Sam is looking for revenue to help curb a $1.5 trillion annual deficit spending habit.

Naturally, this brings up a discussion of whether all the tax breaks big oil companies get are necessary.

Having run through the list of deductions some folks in Washington want to take away from big oil, I would argue that  some are overreaching. It’s only fair that a business should be able to write off its expenses as tax deductions. But other breaks the oil companies get beg for reconsideration.

For instance, when oil companies pay royalties to a foreign nation, they often classify those royalties like tax payments and seek tax credits. Royalties are not taxes. They’re payments to owners of mineral rights.

In any case, oil company executives brought before the Senate Finance Committee last week wouldn’t give an inch on anything.  One of them even put out a press release calling pending tax proposals for Big Oil “Un-American.”

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

People’s’ fascination for Donald Trump may be similar to the fascination they hold for Charlie Sheen.

It’s fun to watch an unabashed ego-maniac whether they are winning or not.

The Donald, however, seems to be losing among folks in the financial sector. In a Bloomberg Global Poll of investors, analysts and traders, 68% viewed him as unfavorable. And in the U.S. that figure jumps to 79%.

Poll respondents didn’t hold back anything: “The last thing this country needs is an uber-political, self-serving, egomaniacal media junkie whose all-sizzle-no-steak approach to life and politics only distracts us all from the real issues and problems of our country,” said Douglas Schoninger, president of DJS Capital Management Inc. in New York.

Click here to read more on the Bloomberg poll.

Trump’s re-dredging of the bogus claims that President Obama is not a U.S.-born citizen also seems to have hurt his credibility as a candidate for U.S. president, poll respondents indicated. As did his irrelevant questions about Obama’s grades in college.

Trump took a real beating last month at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. President Obama mocked him openly on the “birther issue,” after first putting it to rest with a long-form birth certificate from Hawaii – which was a part of the United States at the time of Obama’s birth in case some of you “birthers” didn’t know.

Comedian Seth Meyers topped off the Trump-trashing with this quip:

“Donald Trump has said he’s running for president as a Republican — which is surprising because I thought he was running as a joke.”