Tell It To Al

Ever go to work feeling like someone stuck a “kick me” sign on your back?

Probably not like this guy: Henry Palacio, a 50-year-old Intel Corp. employee in Rio Rancho, N.M., who says his co-workers really did stick a “kick-me” sign on his back and then proceeded to kick him.

Click here to read my column on Marketwatch.

Like a lot of larger-than-life characters, The Great Gatsby wasn’t so great.

With the opening of the fifth Great Gatsby film this weekend, staring Leonardo DiCaprio, gobankingrate.com took a stab at the fictional character’s net worth and concluded he was $22.8 million. Click here to read the analysis.

“We can all learn a profound lesson from a story of excess that leads to tragedy, misery and downfall for its lead character,” it says.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this masterpiece of literature in the 1920s, yet every generation since has had to learn its lessons the hard way.

Banks have had five years to learn how to properly handle foreclosures and loan modification requests.

They’ve also paid steep settlements for their missteps.

But after all that some banks still can’t get it right. Earlier this week New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman threatened to sue Bank of America and Wells Fargo – two of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders – for violating terms of a settlement reached last year.

In that settlement, banks agreed to keep their paperwork straight, but Mr. Schneiderman alleges that they haven’t. Click here to read his press release.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

The city of Harrisburg, Pa., has been charged with with securities fraud for  allegedly making misleading financial statements from 2009 to 2011 in bond offerings.

The city Harrisburg agreed to settle the charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission without admitting or denying the charges.  Click here to read more in The Wall Street Journal. Or click here to read more from the SEC.

Harrisburg is a city that has engaged in decades of financial folly, and most of its problems stem from a cockamamie plan to burn garbage to generate electricity.

I hate to say it, but an activist named Charles Chivis told them so. He used to wear a sign that read “I’m dying of cancer and I know it.” And, “We’re killing our children with dioxin.” He also warned the toxic plant would never be a financial success.

Chivis has long passed but his prophecy lives on.

Click here to read my 2011 column Chivis on MarketWatch.

Some commodities traders have a one-to-10 second millisecond advantage over others on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal.

That’s how much faster some traders get information by connecting to the exchange directly and mastering the technology to crunch the data. Click here to read more in the Journal.

High speed trades have changed markets forever, for both good and bad, often leaving the less technologically savvy at a disadvantage.

With computers making trades at nearly the speed of light, and the Federal Reserve holding interest rates to nearly zero for years and years on end, it’s getting more and more difficult to tell what’s real, and when it may all come apart, if ever.

Warren Buffet’s right hand man calls high-frequency trading “legalized front running” and “basically evil.” Click here to read more about that.

E.B. White, who wrote the 1952 children’s classic, “Charlotte’s Web,” never quite imagined the horrible fate of pigs the way it is today.

Wilbur, the pig in his novel, was only going to be slaughtered after living a relatively nice life on a bucolic farm.

These days,  he’d be squeezed against scores of other swine, hoofing a steel grate floor, while growing fatter and fatter on a factory farm. He’d be commoditized into a hog futures contract. Then some trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
could swap his lifeless body in a millisecond.

“I am pessimistic about the human race,” Mr. White one wrote, “because it is too ingenious for its own good.”

Oh, what a web we weave.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal. And click here to watch me talk about the week’s business news with Will Ripley of Denver’s NBC affiliate, 9News.

Marc Okon, the entrepreneur and former stock broker behind Pet Food Stamps, has started a petition to outlaw “for-profit high kill” animal shelters.

He says an unforgiving economy is resulting in millions of abandoned pets, and that many of them are being handed over to shelters where there is only one way out.

There will always be animals to euthanize. But what is so honorable about turning mass  killing into a profitable business? Click here to read more on the horrors.

Mr. Okon would rather see them fed than dead.

Click here to read the column I wrote on his group, which provides free pet food to people already on public assistance. Since writing the column, he’s says he’s heard from many of my readers seeking to make a donation to his cause.

But Mr. Okon also needs 100,000 signatures on his petition by May 26 to get the Obama Administration to consider it.

Click here to read his petition.

(PHOTO: Marc Okon, in the black suit, and his volunteer staff at Pet Food Stamps.)

All businesses have generally been allowed to deduct what they pay their employees and executives. This, after all, is a cost of doing business.

But what happens when a company pays its executives astronomical sums of money?  Is this a real cost of doing business? Or is it just part of that little game executives and their crony boards play to convert shareholders’ money into their own money?

In 1993, Congress passes a law putting a cap on the deduct ability of CEO pay at $1 million. There was one big exception, though. Any pay that could be characterized as “performance pay” remained fully deductible.

Since 1993, CEO performance pay has grown enormously. With stock options and bonuses, it’s often hundreds of times what average workers make.

A study by the Institute For Policy Studies takes aim at this in a new report called “Fix The Debt CEOs Enjoy Taxpayer Subsidized Pay.” Click here to read the report. It claims the CEOs on the Fix The Debt campaign – the group telling everyone in America what they need to cut – are making millions of dollars a year and the tax code gives their companies a break for paying them.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

Like most consumers I like a deal.

I don’t want to pay $80 or $100 for a shirt. I want a $20 shirt.

I have the luxury of not thinking about the poor conditions someone has to suffer to make this shirt. I have so many shirts, these sorts of thoughts rarely occur to me.

This week’s collapse of a Bangladeshi garment factory, and the deaths of 400 workers, should be a wake up call. It is hardly an isolated incident. These factories seem to collapse or burn down all the time. Click here to read more about it from the Associated Press.

People don’t think about how their actions might affect those in the classes beneath them. The rich don’t think about the problems of the middle class. Those in the middle class don’t think about the poor. The poor don’t even think about the poor in developing countries. And so it goes.

In Bangladesh, a lot of poor souls are toiling hours at a time, for pennies a day, to make shirts for American and European retailers.

It seems contract clothing manufactures operating in Third World countries aren’t far removed from America’s old cotton plantations. The Pope, in fact,  just called it “slave labor.”

Yes, but this is what lifts the poor from their poverty, apologists for this system will say. But a whole lot of good it does to be lifted from poverty and then dropped into a grave.

These manufacturers do things on the cheap, endangering lives, because the retailers they serve demand the low price. It’s easy to blame them or the retailers – Wal-Mart or Sears or whoever is trafficking in these “slave labor” garments.  But when I look in the mirror to admire my brand new shirt, I have to admit that I am the problem.

What’s it take to be middle class? A house in the suburbs? A couple of leased SUVs? The ability to send kids to college?

No.  That’s now for the rich.

All you have to do to be middle class is try not to fall too far behind. In the 16th quarterly Allstate-National Journal Heartland Monitor Pol, 54% of Americans surveyed defined the middle class as those who could still keep up with bills, not get too buried in debt, and not lose their jobs.

They’re not even thinking about getting ahead.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch. And click here for results from the detailed survey.

Dogs and cats didn’t cause the debt crisis, or the economic slump that followed, so why should they go hungry?

Marc Okon, a former stockbroker and entrepreneur, has founded an organization called Pet Food Stamps which distributes free pet foods to pet owners already on government assistance.

While economic headlines boast of recovery, he hears from people every day who are still feeling the pain.

More than 47 million Americans are currently on food stamps, according the the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program. That works out to nearly one out of every seven Americans.

If you are gainfully employed, it is easy not to see these people. But they are out there en masse. I  frequently hear from some who say they were formerly members of America’s middle class.

Their words are usually very grim. Here, for instance, a few lines of a reader email I received today:

“Being a human that went from a high-paying job to food stamps in less than a year, I can safely say that I’m glad I had no pets when I lost my job.  I remember an Oliphant cartoon about the disappearance of the family dog during an earlier recession.  The ghastly visions that I experienced when I fell into clinical depression didn’t include dining on the family pet—they were far worse.”

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