Originally Posted by
Ayonel
Gosh, so, personally, my health care costs have gone up $4,000 this year, and you think I'm a jerk for telling my family that we have to cut back further simply because we've already cut back because my income has also gone down?
Lousy economy + increasing expenses + increasing overhead - lower income = more cutbacks. Simple.
People who don't understand math or economics shouldn't try to form thoughts based on political hogwash they've been spoon-fed.
---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 08:34 AM ----------
You, like almost everyone else, fail to understand how this works. Suppose I run a large public corporation. Ok, sure, let's say I, and my board, make a lot of money. But my job is to maximize profits - for shareholders. More on that in a minute. If the economy is bad, and I am not increasing revenues, then I must cut expenses. The largest expense in most companies is its employees.
Now, what's all the hoopla about profits? Why can't these greedy CEO's make a little less and make the world a better place? Because lower profits mean lower stock prices. Lower stock prices means unhappy shareholders...but who are the shareholders?
Let's assume that my company is a Fortune 500 company. That means that it's probably included in the S&P 500, the Russell, and a few other indices. The point being, there is a high level of institutional ownership. Maybe as high as 90%. So who are your institutional owners? Well, as it turns out, most of them are the woefully underfunded pension funds being managed for the benefit of public employee unions, ERISA's, and 401's.
So, it all comes around to: if public companies are not managed in a way that maximizes profits and drives stock prices up, the main people who are hurt are the very people complaining about the greedy bastards on Wall Street.