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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

#201

Post by quickthrowman »

garmaine wrote: post #76
slowhand09 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not rich here. Wife's company got COVID loans. They were forgiven. Company had to prove money was spent on rent, salaries, benefits. Company didn't make money on it. Employees were able to keep their jobs. No bonuses involved there.

What did they do with the regular income they had during that period that would have gone to rent, salaries, etc.?

Paid it out as to owners/execs as dividends/bonuses, this is what happened in my industry to the companies that took PPP loans but had plenty of work and receivables to pay the bills. Plenty of PPP money was ‘used for payroll’ when there was already money for payroll, then the company is free to do as it wants with it (cash out to owners)

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

#202

Post by qixxiq »

swiley wrote: post #117
hathym wrote: post #5

My company is buying back millions of its own stock, giving 0€ raise to employees.

Part of me wonders if that's one way to give bonuses to employees while avoiding a tax penalty. Most companies give employees stock via various mechanisms so you end up throwing money away by avoiding it.

Yes, but stock ownership isn't even and so it'll again primarily go to the CEO/etc (while reducing their tax impact).

The employees earning minimum wage, and who likely don't hold any stock, won't see any of it.

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

#203

Post by [deleted] »

Jiocus wrote: post #133

The title is almost underwhelming in severity (which is a refreshing break from sensationalistic headlines), “[€28m in bonuses] even after taking three billion euros in loans last year, and 100 million euros in State aid including 65 million from the Netherlands. The company also let go of thousands of people during the coronavirus pandemic.” Booking.com isn't alone engaging in these practices. Many corporations seem…

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by necovek »

__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…

To add another wrinkle to your "proposal", the cost of moving is also very real. If a money helps you remain in your current home for a couple of months that allows you re-establish your income stream without having to both spend money on moving and disrupt your life entirely (imagine having kids switch schools along the way too).

If you are going to help people in need, the best way to do it is with money. Sure, some will misuse it, but we should never optimise for the worst case scenario, but for the most common one.

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

#205

Post by missedthecue »

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.

If you would like companies to just keep billions on hand for totally unpredictable events that shut down the global economy, why don't you start by writing to your congressman asking him to create legislation repealing the Accumulated Earnings Tax, which punishes businesses for holding too much money.

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

#206

Post by donmcronald »

tracer4201 wrote: post #114
maxsilver wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mom and pop shop that is forced to close during the peak should receive money. No, they shouldn't. Don't give any money to any corporations, give all the money exclusively to people. If Mom and Pop run a business, they can get cash as humans to float their business, just like any human could. They could temporarily lay off all their staff (which is OK, because their staff are humans, and are also getting cash) There…

I want to convince you this isn’t a good idea. If all the businesses shut down in my town or city, what happens after? Where do I find work? Especially if I don’t have sufficient capital to start a new business (never mind the skills or training), what will I do then? How does society go back to normal? Do we stop all output and just have the government mail checks to every individual forever? That’s not going to wor…

I saw 2 kinds of "small" businesses in Canada. One kind was hit so hard the bailout money they got wasn't even close to enough to keep their business running. The other kind wasn't impacted or even benefited from increased revenue.

I know of at least one company in the latter category where the owner pocketed around $500k and I don't think it had much impact on how they ran their business. All they had to do was not layoff people they wouldn't have anyway and the government picked up the tab on their labor costs for a year. Free money!

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

#207

Post by quickthrowman »

mminer237 wrote: post #27
ralph84 wrote: post #3

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

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

Companies can raise prices and avoid the effects of inflation so equities will continue to rise, while cash deflates in value. Real estate values keep pace with inflation, generally speaking. Any borrowed money can be paid back cheaper (debt devalues with inflation) which helps anyone who is leveraged on their investments crank up the ROI even more. I’m sure I could come up with more but those are the main three that came to mind.

FWIW, 98% of my net worth is in stocks, the other 2% is cash

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

#208

Post by Sharlin »

__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…

This… has been tried, many times, and been found to not work too well. First off, unless you socialize the whole economy (well, that has been tried as well), government-provided food is still bought from somebody, by the government, and typically this is seen as a superfluous and inefficient extra step.

Second, people very much like going to a supermarket and being able to pick their groceries and other necessities, and having the government distribute some sort of standardized alimentary packages to those in need does not work too well. You could have whole government-run supermarkets with their government-run logistics chains, but again, historically that hasn't worked too well (and I'm saying this as a European liberal leftist!) That said, there are some specific goods and services where a single-payer system works fairly well, such as medicine.

Third, government-supplied housing has, of course been tried as well [1], and housing projects like that often have a tendency to turn into slums sooner or later. It can be done right (first rule: you cannot isolate poor people into their own neighborhoods! [2]) but it's highly nontrivial because of, among other things, NIMBYism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-income_housing

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

#209

Post by MaxBarraclough »

__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…

> I think the government should directly supply the basic needs of its citizens

Suppose you give people $100 worth of food stamps rather than $100 cash. Let's assume people make good use of those food stamps, and let's also assume they have at least $100 to their name to start with. They still end up $100 better off. The landlords can still ramp up the rent by $100, no?

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

#210

Post by hervature »

clusterfish wrote: post #190
hervature wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much money to spend on a decent diet is much easier to ask than how many apples and, if the person wants to substitute apples, how many pears is that?
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