Tell It To Al

A mortgage company defaults on its obilgations and then tells it’s customers not to default on theirs.

Even children know better than that. But the CEO of Residential Capital, a subsidiary of Ally Financial, is doing just that. In fact, I got a letter from him just this month.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

No. 7 shares his thoughts on  business success with The Wall Street Journal: Car dealerships, restaurants and a huge bet on Peyton Manning for a shot at a world championship.

Meg Whitman, who campaign for California governor as a “proven  job creator” is now a job eliminator, with plans to cut 27,000 jobs at Hewlett Packard.

Is this this beginning of  turnaround for H-P? Or just another development in what has long been a tragic corporate tale?

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal. And click here to watch me talk about the layoffs with Matt Flener of Denver’s 9News.

Tipping adds 15% to 20% to any restaurant tab – a cost many consumers don’t even think about until they add up the bill.

How much should you tip for bad service? How much for exceptional service? How much for hardly any service at all?

Noodles & Co. CEO Kevin Reddy says his chain has been growing since the 2008 recession and the high unemployment that follow, in part because his servers do not expect to be tipped. With rising food prices – and increasingly cost-sensitive consumers  – it’s been an effective strategy for Noodles.

Click here to read my column on Marketwatch.

And click here for one blogger’s take on the expansion of tipping expectations since the last recession.

John Scherer, the entrepreneur formerly known as the Video Professor, is now on a mission to replace canned air.

Those 12- and 16-ounce cans of compressed air used to blow out computer keyboards and other electronic equipment are expensive and toxic.

Scherer has come up with a rechargeable can-sized device that pretty much does the same thing with out the hazardous waste. Click here to read my column on Marketwatch. And click here for Scherer’s website.

Scherer, who sold his widely advertised computer tutorial company a couple years ago, bought the product from its inventor, who initially called it “The Blower Buddy.” Scherer quickly renamed it the O2 Hurricane Canless Air System. (Hey, how’d you like to spend millions advertising yourself as the Video Professor only to become known in the end as The Blower Buddy?)

“It’s like a Category 5 Hurricane in your hand,” Scherer said.

I suggested the name “HurriCan” – with no “e”.  But I guess Scherer’s pitch is to get people away from the whole idea of the can. This device is 100% “canless.”

In any case, the Hurricane seems like an easy sell.  It’s green, it cuts costs and it’s made in America.

He’s pitching it to big companies as well as the U.S. Postal Service, which spends millions on cans every year to remove paper dust from mail handling systems. He’s also pitching it to other government agencies. Imagine the cost savings to the government alone.

Maybe they’ll finally stop kicking that stupid can down the road.

Well, there goes the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development claiming Americans just aren’t happy with all their riches.

The Paris-based think tank ranked the U.S. No. 1 for household wealth and No. 12 in “life satisfaction” out of 36 countries tracked. Click here to read the details in US News & World Report.

The idea that money can’t buy happiness has always been a sucker’s consolation prize. The rich want the little people  to think its not so fun being rich, so that they can keep paying that minimum wage.

It is almost impossible to be unhappy with a fat bonus check in your bank, or a huge raise from your boss. Do you ever see anyone with one of those giant lottery checks in their hands, posing for cameras without a smile? The only one who might frown is the baby on those Capital One commercials. Only the baby doesn’t want more cash back. But I bet that baby is getting paid handsomely for those performances.

I know plenty of rich people. The only time they are ever unhappy is when they learn they aren’t as rich as their friends.  This isn’t really unhappiness, so much as ambition.

I, myself, find that I am happiest when I’m unhappy.

Flying around the world in my own private jet would bore me to tears. I need something to rag about to get my juices flowing, like this study.

Anyone who believes this study should give everything they own to the poor and then see who is happy.

Funny how far Facebook shares have fallen since the underwriters stopped supporting it at its offering price.

Shares  were trading as low at $33 today which is down more than 13% from it’s IPO price of $38 on Friday.

What a bust this thing has turned out to be, mainly because of the greed that went into overpricing and then expanding the offering just a day before it traded.

I’m sure glad some folks at Facebook and on Wall Street got filthy rich pumping and dumping their declining shares on the market, because, so far, no one else has. On Friday, underwriters stepped in to curb their embarrassment and keep the price from falling below the offering price of $38. When they stopped doing this on Monday, we finally got to see what the market thinks this thing is worth.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal. And click here to watch me talk about Facebook’s face plant with Matt Flener of Denver’s 9News.

The government set out to catch rich tax cheats and ended up persecuting all the little people living abroad.

That’s why Peter Dunn renounced his U.S.  citizenship last year, and why an increasing number of Americans living abroad are  doing the same.

Click here to read  my column about Dunn on Marketwatch. Taxing people based on citizenship instead of based on where they actually make their living, is wrong, says Dunn. He frequently blogs on the topic at isaacbrocksociety.com.

A Geneva -based group, American Citizens Abroad, is also fighting for expatriates dealing with a harsh tax code. Marylouise Serrato says she’s hearing from an increasing number of frustrated Americans who are considering renouncing their U.S. citizenship.

This, of course, is an extreme thing to do, as I pointed out in a previous column, Tax Dodgers Are Proudly Un-American. The column took aim at wealthy people renouncing their citizenship to avoid paying taxes – like that Facebook co-founder Eduardo Severan.

It did not address middle-class people renouncing their citizenship because the Internal Revenue Service was making their lives unbearable.

Clearly, there is a case to be made that the crusade to round up rich tax cheats is hurting everyone else living abroad. The problem, I think, is that no one in Washington cares to hear it. It’s difficult from someone living abroad, after all, to even catch their attention.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon knows how easy it can be for people to deceive themselves, and yet he somehow still deceives himself.

Long before his bank suffered more than $2 billion in surprise trading losses last week, Dimon had this to say to students at Harvard: “You have to fight self-deception. Human beings are experts at it. I do it, too.”

 Nothing like making a point and then proving it.

Click here to read my column on Marketwatch. And click here to watch me talk about this story with Matt Flener of Denver’s 9News.