CEOs snub wage restraint plea
Article from: The Daily Telegraph

By Rhys Haynes

February 16, 2008 12:00am

AUSTRALIA'S highest paid bosses have snubbed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's plea to freeze wages and curb inflation in 2008.

Taking home a staggering $125 million last year, the top 10 highly paid chief executives of Australia's biggest companies including Macquarie Bank, Telstra and Qantas, yesterday scoffed at suggestions their pay packets would be frozen.

In contrast to MPs who have agreed to Mr Rudd's pay-freeze, Australia's industry captains plan salary increases based on their performance and will ignore any concerns about the broader inflationary outlook. That means their pay packets will likely swell by more than 20 per cent again this year.

Mr Rudd this week proposed that Parliament support a regulation which will stop federal politicians' pay going up until mid next year.

He urged highly-paid executives in the private sector to follow suit to head off a wages outbreak which would drive inflation - and mortgage rates - even higher.

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Gus: didn't take long, did it? 

Microsoft top brass 'burned' by Vista problems
Asher Moses
February 29, 2008 - 4:55PM

Private Microsoft emails unearthed during a US court case have revealed that even the software giant's own executives struggled to get Windows Vista running smoothly.

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Gus: I have no idea... I use the other geek system.
But the man in the street, who was fuming yesterday, was not impressed... Computer-PC had another crash, after years of troubles with "infiltraitors", this time had to reinstall all the operating system, its updates and all the protective anti-virus condoms, and nothing worked properly.
The printer would not work and when the computer was protected against some viruses and some pop-ups, it could not run videos from websites...
The man in the street was furious. Cursing Bill Gates and his operating system Windows — the whole lot could have been thrown out of the window, on the first floor. Programs full of holes like Swiss cheese, he said... Trouble galore, and on top of that Bill's pockets are still bulging with so much cash — he's still at number three on the richest list with a mere 58 billions bux — it hurts deep when the man in the street struggles to make ends meet week after week after week.
The only problem with the other-geek-system-I-use is that some Windows-bits such as Hotmail reinvent themselves with more slowing down stuff and the other-geek-system-I-use was getting down to a crawl when trying to get in...Nearly switched to Yahoo, a site where things were running as smooth as a Prince Charles on a Carrabean cruise. Lucky, there are program geeks, lovely sorts for the other-geek-system-I-use, who constantly rewrite stuff to make sure Windows does not "accidentally" try to cut the other-geek-system-I-use out of the picture. That's my take on the constant bombardment with new "updates".
Just the other day, there was an "update" for java script which, by the size of it, would have been the whole damn lot rewritten. And suddenly boom, the once-simple Microsoft thingies worked again like a charm on the other-geek-system-I-use that by the way does not need any extra anti-this or anti-that in perpetual warfare against Genghis Kan and his hordes of unruly infiltrators...

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Buffett world's richest man, Slim second: Forbes

By Emily Chasan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Warren Buffett, the famed U.S. investor who heads Berkshire Hathaway Inc, replaced his friend and Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates as the richest man in the world, Forbes magazine said on Wednesday.

The magazine estimated Buffett's worth at $62 billion in its annual ranking of the world's wealthiest people.

Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim came in second with an estimated worth of $60 billion, pushing Gates to third place after 13 years of holding the No. 1 spot.

The magazine estimated Gates' worth at $58 billion.

Buffett's rise to No. 1 was particularly noteworthy, Forbes said, as it came at a time of great financial turmoil and as Buffett has begun to siphon off part of his fortune to charity.

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Gus: ... and I believe Buffet is not wasting his time blogging on the net like I am... No money there... but then, I find a certain amount of therapeutical fun in the necessity of the unnecessary... Fluff, rage, rants, cartoons, information tear us away from our polarised daily grind... or overworked paintings... Let these paintings rest, give them time to create our own acceptance of them... Well, that's my excuse for being a lazy minimalist.

Congress Questions Executives on Pay

By JENNY ANDERSON and ERIC DASH
Published: March 7, 2008

WASHINGTON — Three prominent financial executives were summoned before Congress on Friday to face questions about the huge paydays that they earned from the subprime mortgage boom, even as their companies have lost billions of dollars and thousands of borrowers have lost their homes.

Two of the three lost their jobs last fall after the collapse of the subprime market — E. Stanley O’Neal, Merrill Lynch’s chairman and chief executive, and Charles O. Prince III, his counterpart at Citigroup — but left with sizable pay packages. The other, Angelo R. Mozilo, the founder and chief executive of Countrywide Financial, presided over the demise of a once high-flying company that is now being acquired by Bank of America.

They are appearing at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Investigations, which, with its inquiry into supersized ballplayers winding down, once again turned its attention to supersized pay.

Along with the three executives, the chairmen of the compensation committees at all three companies were also scheduled to testify, along with a panel of academics, governance advocates and state and municipal officials.

Executive compensation has emerged as a hot topic in Washington in recent years. Surveys show that Americans, regardless of their income or political leanings, overwhelmingly believe that their business leaders are overpaid.

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And if the good times have really ended, they were never that good to begin with. Most American households are still not earning as much annually as they did in 1999, once inflation is taken into account. Since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s, a prolonged expansion has never ended without household income having set a new record.

For months, policy makers and Wall Street economists have been predicting, and hoping, that the aggressive series of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve would keep the economy growing, despite the housing bust. But the possibility seemed to diminish almost by the hour on Friday.

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Gus: and this morning listening to Radio National news, I heard Bushit saying something like: "the economy is slowing [I understood "the economy is stuffed...]... but the good news is..." I did not hear the rest. I burst into spontaneous laughter... In that millisecond I saw Bush presenting us with a multiple choice of answers including :

"a) that it could be worse.." 

"b) that I'm leaving"

or

"c)  that executive salaries have grown 300 per cent net in the same time your miserable wage shrunk two per cent..."