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Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

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Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#181

Post by nradov »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #151

Covid has got me thinking about the government’s role in social welfare. Providing social welfare through money allows for people to misallocate the money or skim off the top of the money. For the vast majority of people their covid stimulation money did not go into their pockets, it went to their landlord or their mortgage holder resulting in a massive wealth transfer from public funds to banks and those who own lan…

No thanks. I am unwilling to pay taxes to perpetually support people who are capable of working but choose not to.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#182

Post by jessaustin »

jachee wrote: post #137
ipaddr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You force them to close if you want them to come back you have to keep them alive.

Keeping the humans alive should be sufficient.

No, only the Capitalist Heroes know how to tell people to work. Regular humans are totally insufficient to the task.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#183

Post by hugoromano »

compscistd wrote: post #50
hugoromano wrote: post #12

Stop using marketplaces and book directly, these companies have no risks and take 16% to 30% commissions. If consumers start booking directly, recovery from the pandemic will be much faster.

Some perspective from someone who has worked in hospitality: Some brands have fought back in creative ways. An essential part of being listed on Booking or Expedia is to agree to never advertise lower prices anywhere else, including your own website. That means you can share a $100/night rate on your own brand's site (with no commission) and you can't tell Booking or Expedia to show rates over $100. Thus, users have…

What is shocking to me, is why aggregators got bailouts. This is not sustainable for the market. 16% to 30% commission, taxes, costs, almost hotels are subsidizing tourist stays. There is a path outside the marketplaces, we offer plenty of perks for direct guests and it works.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#184

Post by lotsofpulp »

akomtu wrote: post #140
mminer237 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does inflation help the rich? Doesn't that devalue their net worth?

When I reached the entry level wealth and cap gains started to dominate in my income, I realized one thing: there are two types of money, one for the poor (dollars) and one for the rich (stocks, assets). The gov keeps deflating dollars and thanks to complicated behind the scenes mechanics, that wealth gets transferred to assets that magically appreciate in value. When a recession hits, the gov evacuates the assets an…

> There's really no reason why cap gains (all gains, not just realized ones) can't be taxed at a progressive rate, as if it was income.

How would the mechanics of this work? Suppose I had 1 share of publicly traded stock A. Others sell and buy stock A at $x at end of day on Jan 1, 2021, and $x+$10 at end of day on Dec 31, 2021.

Am I now potentially forced to sell some of my stock A to pay taxes on unrealized gains? Is this basically property tax, except applied to all securities?

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#185

Post by dehrmann »

donmcronald wrote: post #171
dehrmann wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps people who are in debt (there's the student loan reduction Biden's been asking for). In theory, it's a wash for assets like stocks and real estate. It hurts bondholders, so especially retirees.

> It helps people who are in debt Does it really though? It definitely helps people who used low, fixed rate debt to buy assets that will appreciate with inflation, but does it really help the average person with $100k in student loans that isn't going to see a wage increase that comes anywhere close to the increased cost of living? IMHO the answer is no.

Federal student loans have a fixed interest rate. Assuming inflation makes its way to wages, that makes the education an appreciating asset.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#186

Post by nradov »

bredren wrote: post #124
tracer4201 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we saying a rent payment is a “transfer of wealth”? I’m not invested in real estate, but I imagine many people in real estate were just as impacted. Don’t you likely need to pay towards a mortgage and put some aside for capital and day to day maintenance? Your comment is written as if a rent payment is a transfer from one person to directly to someone else’s savings account. I’m not convinced this is true.

The great recession resulted in the creation of Blackstone's Invitation Homes, which is the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the US. Homes that used to be owned and rented locally by individuals or small businesses are now rented and managed from elsewhere. Profits resulting from higher rents and cheaper maintenance flow to stock holders, creating bad incentives. These homes are no longer rotating into…

All homes are always on the market for sale, regardless of whether they are listed on the MLS or not. If you see one you like there's nothing stopping you from making an unsolicited offer to Blackstone's Invitation Homes.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#187

Post by asdff »

nradov wrote: post #181
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #151

Covid has got me thinking about the government’s role in social welfare. Providing social welfare through money allows for people to misallocate the money or skim off the top of the money. For the vast majority of people their covid stimulation money did not go into their pockets, it went to their landlord or their mortgage holder resulting in a massive wealth transfer from public funds to banks and those who own lan…

No thanks. I am unwilling to pay taxes to perpetually support people who are capable of working but choose not to.

When did you stop paying taxes? 300 B.C.?

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#188

Post by donmcronald »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #90
ralph84 wrote: post #3

Directly via bailouts and indirectly via inflation, COVID was the biggest wealth transfer to the rich in history.

>via inflation The poor tend to be net borrowers. The rich tend to be net lenders. Inflation makes the poor less in debt by lowering the real value of payback. Inflation helps borrowers.

> The poor tend to be net borrowers.

Wages for the poor won't go up because they don't have any leverage in terms of negotiating. With no fixed assets and no negotiating power to demand higher wages, the value of the real payback won't change for them, but the cost of living will go up.

It'll help a few people who got lucky and bought houses within the last couple of years, but the truly poor (no assets) are about to get much poorer in terms of purchasing power.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#189

Post by necovek »

shkkmo wrote: post #134
necovek wrote: post #92

It seems that most of that €28M was "mostly" paid out in "shares": iow, minimal cash was transferred. That may make it both better or worse for everyone else at Booking.com (if shares go back in value as travel gets reinstated, it will effectively be more than that), but the aid itself was not used to cover these bonuses. Basically, Booking.com shareholders have redistributed their shares to a couple of employees. If…

The reason why Booking.com had no money and needed a bailout is because they spent billions on stock buybacks. So when a company that does lots of buy backs later issues stock to pay bonuses, they might as well be directly using cash from the bailout. Edit: For concrete numbers, Booking.com spent 5.5 BILLION on stock buybacks in the first half of 2019.

Buybacks are not mentioned in this article, and you quote a number from 2019, which is, to the best of my knowledge, pre-pandemic.

If you are saying that they foresaw the pandemic and government grants, well...

Now, I wouldn't be surprised that they were doing that even in 2020, considering they were also taking out $3B in loans (in addition to $100M of subsidies) to maintain the share value or reinvesting in themselves when others had lower trust in them, but when all of these numbers are stacked together, this article title is obviously click-baiting ("Top execs receive €25M of stocks while company borrows €3B and gets €100M in grants" is not something too much fuss will be raised about).

The bigger problem IMO is the regular subsidies they receive for "innovating" (somebody here brought up a figure of >$400M of tax subsidies a year).

I do agree that top executive remuneration is commonly out of hand, but I think that applies even to "regular folk": I find it unfair that my programming salary is like 7x the average salary (10x the median) in my "developing world" country. Both of those problems equally need to be fixed. While I may be providing suitably more economic benefit to my employer, I am not "worth" that much more: the incentives and values are messed up somewhere.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#190

Post by clusterfish »

hervature wrote: post #179
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #151

Covid has got me thinking about the government’s role in social welfare. Providing social welfare through money allows for people to misallocate the money or skim off the top of the money. For the vast majority of people their covid stimulation money did not go into their pockets, it went to their landlord or their mortgage holder resulting in a massive wealth transfer from public funds to banks and those who own lan…

How much food and what quality? Do I get to ask for tomahawk steaks every meal and an extra one to bring home to my dog? Is everyone entitled to an avocado or just those that live close to an avocado farm? There is no easy answer to this and you bet a government mandated system would be heavily lobbied to include/exclude certain things. For housing, do you get to decide where you live? Or does the government set up a…

> How much food and what quality?

Food stamps make this back into a "how much money" question without getting into execs pockets.

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