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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

#231

Post by b9a2cab5 »

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?

Wages are not as liquid as assets. You generally get a raise once every 6 months to a year, and it's time consuming to find a new job to get competing offers to get leverage for market-level wages. In contrast assets change prices every day, and as COVID as shown, adapt very quickly to the printing of money.

At the low end wages are also capped by the minimum wage, which doesn't go up with the important inflation metrics (healthcare, housing, assets, education) but instead with regulation or CPI.

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

#232

Post by anigbrowl »

trentnix wrote: post #226
andrepd wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>government is doing the steering That under capitalism those who accumulate massive amounts of wealth can use that wealth to “buy” the state institutions to do their bidding, is precisely (one of the) problems in capitalism.

One way to address that problem is to prevent "state institutions" from being so powerful as being able to do anyone's bidding .

Dysfunctional states aren't exactly thriving oases of enterprise and mutual aid, are they now? In practice they're dominated by warlords and rich people buy security and contract enforcement is a function of economic leverage, so poor people have very little economic mobility or opportunity.

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

#233

Post by archibaldJ »

savant_penguin wrote: post #7

The real error here is public money being given to private companies. Let them break Fund people, not companies

Computationally, company is an order higher than humans in that it contains "structures" designed to generate revenue, and these "structures" consists of physical things (ranging from items in a physical store to an office space to entire factory, etc) as well as none-physical things (e.g. productivity optimisation across a 'team' of people who had worked together for a long peroid of time, trust in the supply chain, etc). When a company dissolves, many of these "structures" will be gone. In general there are many costs to reconstruct these "structures" after they are gone.

It will be amazing if

- it's cheaper to construct these structures designed to generate revenue (and we already see this in tech-driven stuff, which was how the notion of start-up emerged from the 70s)

- people are motiviated and are willing to overcome the hardship (as well as, in many cases, unconfortable feelings) to learn to construct these structures or to learn things that will help (e.g. programming, etc)

Unfortunately, most of these structures are currently still expensive (thanks to this, start-ups and techs are in general over-hyped [1]). And most people prefer consuming stuff mindlessly than learning things. Mindfulness is the key.

Therefore I'm extremely grateful that we as a civilisation are finlly entering the first phrase of the psychedelic renaissance. Psychedelic would always have a net positive impact to society at large as they force people to come to terms with reality as well as their very own phsyical existence, and be more mindful about the qualia of this world.

[1]: not necessarily a bad thing as they can eventually flatten all these cost structures

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

#234

Post by nielsbot »

ska wrote: post #111
nielsbot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"taste of the wig"? I don't know that saying.. is it "wine"?

I suspect a typo for "vig", short for "vigorish".

Cheers. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vigorish

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

#235

Post by RHSeeger »

__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…

> 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

And then the money that _would_ have gone to pay those bills went into their pocket; and then to presumably pay some other bills (food, etc). Paying for a place to live is an expected expense that most people have. Helping people pay that expense helps those people. To pretend the only ones helped by it are the landlords/banks is ridiculous.

> Government provided housing and food should be available to any citizen — no questions asked. At that point you can get rid of all welfare programs since the government is directly supplying the basic necessities for those in need.

No, you can't. As an example, what about someone that is paying off a house and is in a downturn. Your solution is to have them stop paying for the house (lose it to the bank) and move into government housing. So, in exchange for a couple months of help with their bills, they get to discard their ownership in their house.

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

#236

Post by lotux »

tasssko wrote: post #219
lotux wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, most rich people can get good loans with low rate during this time, as inflation goes up, the value of asset that they bought with loan goes up and debt value goes down, so the get richer twice again that is why for example bill gates became biggest land owner during covid, I guess he bought lots of land with cheap loans

Bill Gates has a team of people in a ‘family office’ managing his money the reality he probably had a windfall last year and needed to do something with it. Usually when you have a windfall you buy treasuries because they can be liquidated easily when new opportunities are available. Buying treasuries is a bad idea at the moment, they have negative yields when you factor in inflation. He probably had no good stock op…

the point is, he or his fund can also get cheap loans when rates are historic low by land and win twice by inflation

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

#237

Post by archibaldJ »

archibaldJ wrote: post #233
savant_penguin wrote: post #7

The real error here is public money being given to private companies. Let them break Fund people, not companies

Computationally, company is an order higher than humans in that it contains "structures" designed to generate revenue, and these "structures" consists of physical things (ranging from items in a physical store to an office space to entire factory, etc) as well as none-physical things (e.g. productivity optimisation across a 'team' of people who had worked together for a long peroid of time, trust in the supply chain,…

And intriguingly, one can also say that the phenomena of start-up is perhaps a branching-out of 60s' hippie movement (partially inspired by books such as The Whole Earth Catalog which is not only spiritual-ish but leans more towards pragmatism) where instead of going all anti-capitalism and trying to be self-sustainable from the ground-up and detach itself from the economy (which eventually always ran into problems cuz then it became a micro-economy itself, which was the very thing it tried to transcend), start-ups aims to be self-sustainable in the existing econcomy while detaching itself from the cooperate cultures.

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

#238

Post by dbg31415 »

Likely bonus criteria were set up in advance, but governments handing companies money certainly didn't hurt. Nor did having the people who run the company choose to award themselves bonuses. But look... end of the day here, if you give money to businesses don't expect the people running those businesses to do anything that isn't selfish with the money.

If you give a bum on the street $5, he's going to spend that money on himself. If you give a CEO $5M, he's going to spend that money on himself too. I don't see why any sane person would expect anything different. Moral of the store is don't give money to people... not bums on the street, or CEOs. Just don't do it. You'll be let down every time.

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

#239

Post by akomtu »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #184
akomtu wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? I…

Exactly. A middle class person doesn't cry wolf that he needs to sell a portion of his house to pay the property tax, while the rich do. For example, Bezos owns 10% of Amazon voting shares would pay 0.1% per year in the form of a lien (or a loan) that lets him retain voting rights, but takes the tax when he sells or transfers his wealth (e.g. to heirs). If capital taxes existed, the rich wouldn't be able to lazily sit in the sp500 index, they would have to chase good investments (they'd have to, God forbid, take risks and do some work).

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

#240

Post by ljm »

mdorazio wrote: post #73
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.

Yes, and what did those employees who would have otherwise been unemployed spend their money on? Likely rent was the #1 item, thus transferring wealth from tax dollars to asset holders.

But they were paying rent or paying their mortgage before it happened too.

All it says is that it's a good thing that the government backed you up when you were in trouble. And I'd rather see the government back up the poor folk instead of them bailing out the stupidly wealthy. It'd cost less money.

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