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#corporate financing
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weeinerville · 2 months
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oh my god its jack marston
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pickle-m4n · 1 year
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streaming services try not to cancel and fuck animation over challenge (SUPER HARD)
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robertreich · 1 year
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How the Corporate Takeover of American Politics Began
The corporate takeover of American politics started with a man and a memo you've probably never heard of.
In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, to draft a memo on the state of the country.
Powell’s memo argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.
In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of the Second World War. They wanted to ensure corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders — workers, consumers, and the environment — not just their shareholders.
But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. In his memo, Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat, and stressed that the critical ingredients for success were joint organizing and funding.
The Chamber distributed the memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations — hoping to persuade them that Big Business could dominate American politics in ways not seen since the Gilded Age.
It worked.
The Chamber’s call for a business crusade birthed a new corporate-political industry practically overnight. Tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists and political operatives descended on Washington and state capitals across the country.
I should know — I saw it happen with my own eyes.
In 1976, I worked at the Federal Trade Commission. Jimmy Carter had appointed consumer advocates to battle big corporations that for years had been deluding or injuring consumers.
Yet almost everything we initiated at the FTC was met by unexpectedly fierce political resistance from Congress. At one point, when we began examining advertising directed at children, Congress stopped funding the agency altogether, shutting it down for weeks.
I was dumbfounded. What had happened?
In three words, The Powell Memo.
Lobbyists and their allies in Congress, and eventually the Reagan administration, worked to defang agencies like the FTC — and to staff them with officials who would overlook corporate misbehavior.
Their influence led the FTC to stop seriously enforcing antitrust laws — among other things — allowing massive corporations to merge and concentrate their power even further.
Washington was transformed from a sleepy government town into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, and five-star hotels.
Meanwhile, Justice Lewis Powell used the Court to chip away at restrictions on corporate power in politics. His opinions in the 1970s and 80s laid the foundation for corporations to claim free speech rights in the form of financial contributions to political campaigns.
Put another way — without Lewis Powell, there would probably be no Citizens United — the case that threw out limits on corporate campaign spending as a violation of the “free speech” of corporations.
These actions have transformed our political system. Corporate money supports platoons of lawyers, often outgunning any state or federal attorneys who dare to stand in their way. Lobbying has become a $3.7 billion dollar industry.
Corporations regularly outspend labor unions and public interest groups during election years. And too many politicians in Washington represent the interests of corporations — not their constituents. As a result, corporate taxes have been cut, loopholes widened, and regulations gutted.
Corporate consolidation has also given companies unprecedented market power, allowing them to raise prices on everything from baby formula to gasoline. Their profits have jumped into the stratosphere — the highest in 70 years.
But despite the success of the Powell Memo, Big Business has not yet won. The people are beginning to fight back.
First, antitrust is making a comeback. Both at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department we’re seeing a new willingness to take on corporate power.
Second, working people are standing up. Across the country workers are unionizing at a faster rate than we’ve seen in decades — including at some of the biggest corporations in the world — and they’re winning.
Third, campaign finance reform is within reach. Millions of Americans are intent on limiting corporate money in politics – and politicians are starting to listen.
All of these tell me that now is our best opportunity in decades to take on corporate power — at the ballot box, in the workplace, and in Washington.
Let’s get it done.
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thoughtportal · 1 year
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Corporate takeover of the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.
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genuinely bewildered at how it's just g@merg@te again. like it's just exactly the same strategy, except now it's a cabal of dark and sinister narrative designers instead of "there are women near my games" but it's like the same fucking thing and I'm so tired honestly
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kirnet · 3 days
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Based off of how literally every artist I know is now in accounting or teaching. Day job here means where you get the bulk of your income or benefits. And this goes for any artistic major! Fine arts, animation, theater, film etc
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clockworkbibliophile · 3 months
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lord I am so exhausted of applying to dozens of jobs every week without getting a single response other than your application wasn’t selected. my current job is wrecking me and I am so burnt out and just want a job that pays well and doesn’t make me want to die 24/7. im at my wits end like who do I need to pay to make my resume/linkedin stand out because how do people hear back from jobs??? what am I doing wrong
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barbie-academia · 2 years
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Prissy and Studious
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#Republican Endorsed Killings
#Well Regulated Militia
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bankergirl · 9 months
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One day, I’ll reach my dream of working in the city.
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imagionary · 8 months
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Some Branch Accountant concepts; (he and Benjamin used to date ages ago, back in their old conglomerate)
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Biden set to appoint mass foreclosure cheerleader to the Fed
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Personnel are policy, something that the Biden administration has proved again and again since the 2020 election. Biden himself is a kind of empty vessel into which different wings of the Democratic party pour their will, yielding a strange brew of appointments both great and terrible.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly
On the one hand, you have progressive appointments like Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ and Lina Khan at the FTC, leaders who are determined to challenge and curb corporate power:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/10/see-you-in-the-funny-papers/#bidens-legacy
On the other hand, you have deferential leaders like Pete Buttigieg, who fill their own staff with status quo counsel, and then let those timid corporate apologists run the show, leaving the substantial enforcement powers of a powerful agency to gather dust:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
While the Democrats’ anti-corporate wing got to drive the administration’s competition agencies, the corporate wing has enjoyed near-total dominance over finance regulations (with notable exceptions, e.g. Rohit Chopra), starting with Trump’s Jerome Powell, a bloodletting monster happy to shovel workers into their bosses’ crushers all day long:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/19/creditors-vs-workers/#finance-colored-glasses
Corporate Dems continue to flex their muscle. A seat has just opened up on the Federal Reserve Board, and the WSJ is pretty sure the seat is going to Janice Eberly, a corporate ghoul who helped Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner steal Americans’ houses on behalf of the bankers who destroyed the world economy in 2008:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-considers-two-economists-for-fed-vice-chair-58f13344
A quick refresher: Obama inherited the Great Financial Crisis, a massive global asset crash that followed from a decade of real-estate and derivatives deregulation that saw the world’s largest banks issuing mortgages they knew would fail, and then placing massive bets on “collateralized debt obligations” that were supposed to offset the risk.
The banks gambled trillions, nearly destroyed the world’s economy, and then blamed it all on reckless borrowers — mortgage holders who had been mis-sold predatory mortgages that were designed to trigger defaults thanks to low “teaser rates” that later “ballooned” into monthly payments the banks knew the borrowers couldn’t afford.
Geithner was Obama’s go-to guy for the GFC. It was under his leadership that billions were handed out to the banks to bail them out and keep them solvent during the crisis — and it was also under his leadership that bank execs were able to pay themselves millions in bonuses using that public money.
When the banks were in trouble, Geithner leapt into action. When the banks’ customers faced crises, he was MIA — especially during the foreclosure epidemic that followed, as the banks stole our homes out from under us, often forging the paperwork. No bank was seriously punished for this policy.
Back to Janice Eberly, who served as Geithner’s assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy — his hatchet-woman, in other words. Now, sometimes people in senior government roles stick around because they disagree with their bosses and want to mitigate the harm of their bosses’ policies.
That’s not why Eberly took the job. In 2014, she and Arvind Krishnamurthy co-wrote a Brookings Institute paper called “Efficient Credit Policies in a Housing Debt Crisis,” that explained why Geithner had it right all along — bailing out the banks and leaving homeowners in foreclosure is “efficient”:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/fall2014bpea_eberly_krishnamurthy.pdf
Writing in The American Prospect, Max Moran from the Revolving Door Project breaks down “Efficient Credit Policies,” explaining how Eberly’s stated views should disqualify her from sitting on the Fed board, especially as we teeter on the brink of a deep financial crisis:
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-06-janice-eberly-fed-nominee-mortgage-crisis/
The first thing you need to understand here is HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program, which received the $100b Congress allocated to help homeowners whose mortgages were “underwater” — that is, whose houses were worth less than they owed for them.
That money could have gone to “principal reduction” — that is, to paying off part of your loan. If you owned $350,000 on a house that was now worth $300,000, the Feds could give the bank $50k and you wouldn’t be underwater anymore. The FDIC proposed just this, in a plan that would have required homeowners to pay back the US government if the price of their homes rebounded.
If you want to keep Americans from losing their homes, principal reduction is a straightforward and reliable approach. But the banks hated this — and that meant Geithner wouldn’t do it. Banks don’t like principal reduction because it means that they’ll lose out on future payments: reducing your principal by $50k now means that the banks won’t get hundreds of thousands of dollars over the 30 years of your mortgage.
Using the money for principal reduction would have meant the banks’ balance sheets would have looked a little worse — which, as Moran points out, is a perfectly fair outcome for banks that had just come close to destroying the world economy, especially since many of these underwater borrowers were destined to lose their houses and would never make those payments.
But Geithner didn’t do principal reduction. Instead, he did HAMP, which was just a way to temporarily lower borrowers’ monthly payments so they could stay in their homes. Geithner sold Obama on this plan, convincing him to renege on his election promise to support a “cramdown” on the banks, which would have saved homeowners:
https://www.propublica.org/article/dems-obama-broke-pledge-to-force-banks-to-help-homeowners
HAMP was full of the kinds of complex requirements and paperwork that the professional managerial class love, rules that made it almost impossible for homeowners to invoke HAMP and improve their payments. Meanwhile, the banks got “investor incentive payments” that let them take in public money even as they foreclosed on the public:
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/principal-reduction-alternative-under-the-home-affordable-modification-program
HAMP was a disaster. Almost no one managed to use it, and even among the lucky few who did manage to do so, many were tricked into foreclosure.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/30/government-program-save-homes-mortgages-failure-banks
This is the policy that Eberly and Krishnamurthy defend in their paper: rather than reducing debt, just temporarily restructure mortgage payments. One reason they defend this: it’s cheaper, and Congress didn’t allocate enough money to help everyone who needed principal reduction. But, as Moran points out, Geithner’s anemic response to the crisis caused Congress to claw back $225b of the money allocated to deal with it — enough to do $50k principal reductions for 4.5m households. Under Geithner, HAMP only spent $10b.
But of course, the US government didn’t need to pay the banks off to do principal reduction. They could simply order the banks to take a loss. That’s how lending usually works: lenders who originate bad loans have to eat them — they don’t get made whole by Uncle Sucker.
But when Eberly was working for Geithner, “federal officials convinced themselves this was impossible.” Rather than hold banks to account for their reckless speculation, Geithner announced that he was going to “foam the runway” for the banks, pureeing Americans’ homes to make the foam.
But Eberly’s tenure coincided with the banks’ rebound — by the time she went to work for Geithner, they were rolling in dough, posting massive profits. As @[email protected] put it, “If you force them to eat a bunch of foreclosure losses, maybe a few hundred billion over several years, it probably wouldn’t have been that bad.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPLbnr1mxBs
Moran nails it here: “When a bad loan is made, it is both prudent and fair for the lender to bear the most responsibility. They are supposed to be wise stewards of their own capital. Instead, ordinary homeowners who did the least of any actor to cause the financial crisis ended up eating the losses.”
Eberly and Krishnamurthy claimed that Geithner’s policy would be efficient, and that it wouldn’t lead to mass foreclosures. As neoclassical economists love to do, they “proved” this using elaborate mathematical models. And, also in the grand neoclassical tradition, they didn’t bother to check whether their model was correct.
To quote Ely Devons: “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse
Here’s what Eberly and Krishnamurthy missed: the choice to foreclose wasn’t being made by the lenders, they were being made by the mortgage servicer, a kind of consequence-free middleman who made more money by foreclosing on homeowners, even if the lenders lost more money over the long term:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228125783_Why_Servicers_Foreclose_When_They_Should_Modify_and_Other_Puzzles_of_Servicer_Behavior_Servicer_Compensation_and_its_Consequences
Eberly and Krishnamurthy barely mention the existence of servicers, but another researcher was keenly aware of them: a law prof named Katie Porter, who delved into the servicers’ role in foreclosure in a report for the California AG:
https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/mortgage_settlement/01-report-waiting-for-change.pdf
Porter identified the servicers’ “dual track” approach to distressed mortgage borrowers: on the one hand, they slow-walked HARP-based changes to payments, and on the other hand, they raced to foreclose on those borrowers who were waiting for their payments to reset.
The servicers’ hunger to throw people out of their homes knew no bounds: they set up massive robo-signing boiler-rooms where low-waged employees forged deeds to plug the paperwork holes created by the high-speed, unregulated speculation on mortgages that precipitated the Great Financial Crisis:
https://www.reuters.com/article/robosigning-plea/ex-mortgage-document-exec-pleads-guilty-in-robo-signing-case-idUSL1E8ML0C120121121
Eberly knew about robo-signing, she knew about servicers, she knew about foreclosures. It was her job to know. But she still wrote her paper defending Geithner’s runway-foaming and all those ruined lives:
Principal reduction can be helpful, but it is a less efficient use of government resources, since it back-loads payments to households that cannot borrow against these future resources to support consumption today, and also because it is most helpful in reducing strategic default, rather than payment-distress-induced default,
This is just means-testing by another name, a fetish for separating the “deserving poor” from “moochers” (AKA “strategic defaulters”). The PMC loves means-testing, but only for poor people. As Moran points out, rich people like Trump use strategic defaults all the time:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html
Elite economists and finance ghouls convinced themselves that helping people stay in their homes would enable waves of crooked “strategic defaulting” but there’s no evidence this was ever widespread — rather, it was a fairy tale that justified mass foreclosure:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27585/w27585.pdf
Eberly helped throw millions of Americans into the street in order to reward reckless banks, already wildly profitable banks, with even more profit. And far from regretting this, she went on to write elaborate justifications for the cruel policies she helped administer.
The historian Michael Hudson describes debt and debt cancellation as a key determinant of whether a given civilization survives. In every venture, producers have to borrow capital from lenders — farmers, for example, must borrow to pay for seed and fertilizer and labor. When the ventures are successful, the borrowers pay back the lenders.
But not every venture can succeed. There will always be blights, droughts, fires and other risks that can’t be fully mitigated. When failure occurs, borrowers can’t pay back creditors. If you farm long enough, you’ll eventually lose a crop, and have to roll over your debts next year. Eventually, you’ll owe so much that you can’t even make the interest payments.
In the absence of some structured, periodic debt cancellation — such as the Bronze Age tradition of Jubilee — creditors eventually end up controlling the work of the entire productive sector. When that happens, your society stops producing what everyone needs, and instead just makes the things that rich people want:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles
A civilization can’t survive if all of its farmers are growing ornamental flowers for rich creditors’ villas instead of staple crops. It can’t survive if every productive worker is stuck in a dead-end job or a dead-end place because of medical or student debt.
Personnel are policy. Eberly has explained, in excruciating detail, exactly what policy she favors — policy that rewards reckless speculation by incinerating the life chances of everyday Americans. Appointing her to the Federal Reserve board would be a giant Fuck You from the Biden admin to every person who got their home stolen by a bank.
Tomorrow (Mar 7), I’m doing a remote talk for TU Wien.
On Mar 9, you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.
On Mar 10, Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.
Image: Medill DC (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Timothy_Geithner_in_2011.jpg
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
[Image ID: A bombed out neighborhood. Over the crumbling houses is the 'HOPE' wordmark from Shepard Fairey's Obama campaign posters. On the right is the grinning face of Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, colorized to match the Fairey posters. On the left is an ogrish, top-hatted capitalist figure, chomping a cigar and disdainfully holding aloft a single-family home between a gloved forefinger and thumb. He stands before a podium bearing the Citibank logo. The podium has a lever in the shape of a golden dollar-sign, which he is yanking with his free hand. He, too, has been colorized in the mode of the Fairey poster.]
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bigmammallama5 · 3 months
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Nothing makes me feel better emotionally than seeing other adults that I admire also have to deal with their work clients being absolutely stupid or irrating. Like I know that's a weird statement but I'm glad it's not just me that feels like this.
This is about your rant about your client btw
LOL I usually try to keep a pretty decent separation between here and real life/career just so I can have a nice online space to exist in, but sometimes. Sometimes I just. Let me be clear, our clients routinely break little pieces of my remaining soul on the daily lmao but I tend to keep that bitching for my close friends. Sometimes that bitching breaks containment. Solidarity, friend. Make sure you have good non-work things to help regrow and feed your happiness outside of your job.
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Corporate Finance Brilliance: The Ultimate Student Guide to Assignment Assistance
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Embarking on the journey of corporate finance education can be both exhilarating and challenging for students. As the intricacies of financial concepts unfold, students often find themselves grappling with complex assignments, homework, and exams that demand a profound understanding of corporate finance principles. To navigate this challenging terrain successfully, it's essential to seek the right guidance and assistance. In this comprehensive guide, we explore the significance of corporate finance assignment help and provide invaluable insights for students striving for brilliance in their financial education.
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junk-culture · 5 months
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youve heard of spending 3 years doing some kind of "useless" humanities degree and then going back to working in a supermarket or whatever. but what about spending 3 years doing a "useful" accounting degree and then going back to working in a supermarket or whatever. would that be kind of based
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