I have been away from the usual posts and working on adjusting to being away from my wife, my kids,loved ones and family. When you have 6 children and don't get to see any of them its tough. I pray that I will be reunited with them sometime soon and get to spend some time with people whom I love and care about.
Markets - well I have to say that I have been out of the loop for awhile and it seems that the long-predicted correction is taking place. After a 10 month rally during which many shares doubled or tripled in price - its coming to an end. This is why we are seeing sharp sell-offs and the truth to what has any value anymore. Most of these companies are extremely overvalued, concerns over proposed new banking regulations, soft retails sales numbers out of the U.K. , USA and Canada.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Earthquake hits near Philippines
WASHINGTON –
A strong earthquake struck south of the Philippines on Wednesday, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.
The quake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.7 and was located in the Celebes Sea, 175 miles southeast of Jolo, Sulu Archipelago, and 730 miles south of Manila. The quake hit at 5:41 p.m. EDT, or 5:41 a.m. Thursday local time.
USGS did not report any damages or injuries.
The quake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.7 and was located in the Celebes Sea, 175 miles southeast of Jolo, Sulu Archipelago, and 730 miles south of Manila. The quake hit at 5:41 p.m. EDT, or 5:41 a.m. Thursday local time.
USGS did not report any damages or injuries.
Is the end near? There is sure alot of Calamity going on around the world. What date? 2012 like the Movie?
We need to do the best we can on this planet now. We need to set examples for our children and make each day count - do the best we can.
The millennium and end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it prophecies
"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." Charles Schultz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip.
Typhoon Ondoy Relief
Tropical storm “Ondoy” (international codename: Ketsana), which killed at least 295 people last month, was followed by Typhoon “Pepeng” (Parma) a week later, causing another 16 deaths.
Many areas in Manila and the northern provinces remain flooded, and the government has warned of possible epidemics.
At least 1.9 million people have been affected by Typhoon Ketsana. Severe flooding has displaced over 450,000 and has accounted for the deaths of over 250 people.
Filipinos in RI raise funds for flood victims
Lilian Budianto , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta Thu, 10/08/2009 10:57 AM World
Members of the Filipino community living in Jakarta have collected more than US$10,000 to help around 1 million victims of two major storms in their home country, says the country’s ambassador.
Ambassador Vidal Erfe Querol said on Tuesday Filipinos had collected and sent $10,850 in cash to the Philippines Red Cross and social welfare services to help victims of typhoons in the Philippines, which have killed hundreds and left thousands homeless.
“We organize the fundraising through social networking websites and through short messages,” he said.
“We will also arrange a bingo event in November, whose proceeds will go to help typhoon victims.”
Rodolfo C. Balmater, who leads the Filipino community in the fundraising, said they were also looking for ways to help people in the Philippines rebuild their lives.
“The first phase is to collect money to buy emergency relief supplies, such as food and clothing. The next step over the coming months is the Filipino community here will move on to the project of rebuilding destroyed schools and libraries,” he said.
“We will gather the information of what kind of assistance they need and how we can help them,” Balmater said.
There are around 10,000 Filipinos living and working in Indonesia, mostly as managers, accountants, engineers and teachers in English-medium schools.
The Associated Press reported the United Nations appealed Tuesday for $74 million to help typhoon victims in the Philippines.
UN humanitarian chief John Holmes said the appeal was to seek money for food, water, sanitation facilities, emergency shelters and healthcare for those worst affected by Tropical Storm Ketsana and Typhoon Parma.
To jump-start the response, Holmes said he had authorized an immediate allocation of $7 million from the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund.
The appeal has already received between $9 million and $10 million, Holmes said.
In addition to UN efforts, he said many governments in the region and elsewhere, including the United States, were helping in different ways.
Ketsana killed almost 300 people, with 40 still missing, and destroyed or badly damaged almost 40,000 houses, thereby affecting 4 million people, Holmes said. Some 300,000 are still in emergency evacuation centers, he added.
The storm lashed Manila and nearby provinces on Sept. 26, causing the worst flooding in the capital in more than four decades.
Eight days later, Parma blew across the country’s mountainous north, bringing more rain to the still-sodden region.
At least 16 people died when the typhoon hit the main island of Luzon on Oct. 3, though Manila.
Here are some pictures of good deeds in the Philippines. People helping people.
Enjoy.
Todd
http://www.flickr.com/search/show/?q=typhoon+ondoy+relief
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=typhoon+ondoy+relief&m=text
Many areas in Manila and the northern provinces remain flooded, and the government has warned of possible epidemics.
At least 1.9 million people have been affected by Typhoon Ketsana. Severe flooding has displaced over 450,000 and has accounted for the deaths of over 250 people.
Filipinos in RI raise funds for flood victims
Lilian Budianto , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta Thu, 10/08/2009 10:57 AM World
Members of the Filipino community living in Jakarta have collected more than US$10,000 to help around 1 million victims of two major storms in their home country, says the country’s ambassador.
Ambassador Vidal Erfe Querol said on Tuesday Filipinos had collected and sent $10,850 in cash to the Philippines Red Cross and social welfare services to help victims of typhoons in the Philippines, which have killed hundreds and left thousands homeless.
“We organize the fundraising through social networking websites and through short messages,” he said.
“We will also arrange a bingo event in November, whose proceeds will go to help typhoon victims.”
Rodolfo C. Balmater, who leads the Filipino community in the fundraising, said they were also looking for ways to help people in the Philippines rebuild their lives.
“The first phase is to collect money to buy emergency relief supplies, such as food and clothing. The next step over the coming months is the Filipino community here will move on to the project of rebuilding destroyed schools and libraries,” he said.
“We will gather the information of what kind of assistance they need and how we can help them,” Balmater said.
There are around 10,000 Filipinos living and working in Indonesia, mostly as managers, accountants, engineers and teachers in English-medium schools.
The Associated Press reported the United Nations appealed Tuesday for $74 million to help typhoon victims in the Philippines.
UN humanitarian chief John Holmes said the appeal was to seek money for food, water, sanitation facilities, emergency shelters and healthcare for those worst affected by Tropical Storm Ketsana and Typhoon Parma.
To jump-start the response, Holmes said he had authorized an immediate allocation of $7 million from the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund.
The appeal has already received between $9 million and $10 million, Holmes said.
In addition to UN efforts, he said many governments in the region and elsewhere, including the United States, were helping in different ways.
Ketsana killed almost 300 people, with 40 still missing, and destroyed or badly damaged almost 40,000 houses, thereby affecting 4 million people, Holmes said. Some 300,000 are still in emergency evacuation centers, he added.
The storm lashed Manila and nearby provinces on Sept. 26, causing the worst flooding in the capital in more than four decades.
Eight days later, Parma blew across the country’s mountainous north, bringing more rain to the still-sodden region.
At least 16 people died when the typhoon hit the main island of Luzon on Oct. 3, though Manila.
Here are some pictures of good deeds in the Philippines. People helping people.
Enjoy.
Todd
http://www.flickr.com/search/show/?q=typhoon+ondoy+relief
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=typhoon+ondoy+relief&m=text
Congratulations - Efren Peñaflorida Jr. - A CNN hero started with a pushcart full of hopes
Hey - my home now. This is where I live in the Philippines - Cavite. Yes I live in the slum area to. Congratulations Efren Penaflorida Jr. Thanks for putting Cavite on the map in a positive way. Things are moving on up. Way to go!! Slumdog Millionaires now to transpire in Cavite - Coming Soon........
GMANews.TV - Thursday, October 8
With an ocean of garbage as his playground as a child, Efren Peñaflorida Jr. was accustomed to living amid the ills of society. The slum area in Cavite province where he grew up abounded with solvent-sniffing kids and tough gangsters. People sifted through dumpsites during the day and slept in the cemetery’s empty crypts at night.
To vote for Peñaflorida as CNN Hero of the Year, click here. It was 1997. Peñaflorida, a gangling 16-year-old youngster back then, was occasionally bullied and beaten by street toughies. No one would have thought that, 12 years later, he would be short-listed by globally known Cable News Network (CNN) as a candidate for its CNN Heroes. “I grew up really poor. My father was a driver and my mother was a laundrywoman. When I went to school, I experienced being mocked, bullied, discriminated against," said Peñaflorida, the second of three children.
“I wanted to settle scores with the bullies. But I realized I could turn a bad experience into something positive." At the time, Peñaflorida was part of Club 8586, a youth group in Cavite. His mentor encouraged him to help curb the rampant gang wars and fraternity feuds in their communities, where kids as young as nine years were already involved in violent fights.
‘Pushcart classroom’ Despite having to cope with his own limited means, Peñaflorida formed the Dynamic Teen Company (DTC) with his two peers. The fledgling group ventured into work among destitute and out-of-school youth, teaching them basic literacy skills, values formation, and even personal hygiene. Armed only with plastic bags loaded with books and school supplies, Peñaflorida and his team roamed the shantytowns of Cavite, offering kids a unique chance to learn useful things in the “street classroom" setting.
Years later, the platform for their mobile classroom would evolve into pedicabs, and eventually into what it is today – a Kariton Klassrum (literally, “pushcart classroom"). The Kariton Klassrum now carries a mini-library, reading aids, blackboards, and even detachable tables and chairs. One of the mobile classrooms turns into a "relief cart" for Ondoy victims. DTC file photo Peñaflorida says that his commitment to teach basic literacy to kids is his way of “paying forward" – having been a scholar himself. His elementary and high school education was funded by World Vision Philippines, while his college education was shouldered by Club 8586. Not surprisingly, he took up a degree in Education.
Now 28, Peñaflorida earns a living as a public school teacher in Cavite. On Saturdays, he continues his pushcart classrooms –which have expanded into Manila – with other teen volunteers now reaching 2,000. Aside from teaching literacy, the group also conducts feeding programs for abandoned street kids who scavenge for food by sifting through heaps of garbage.
Who is a hero?
When the world-renowned Cable News Network (CNN) early this year called for submissions for its annual search for Heroes, Club 8586 nominated Peñaflorida.
The network’s Blue Ribbon Panel sifted through 9,000 nominees from over 100 countries, and soon narrowed down its choices to 28. On October 1 (October 2 in Manila), CNN announced its top 10 finalists for its Hero of the Year. Peñaflorida made the cut.
The word “hero" has been used so loosely, that these days even someone who performs a singular, momentary selfless act like jumping into a river to save a child is quickly declared a hero. But the same public recognition is not so easily earned by a person who performs the same heroic act, quietly and doggedly from day to day. Peñaflorida (in white) pushes for change. Hub Pacheco file photo Nonetheless, Rezcel Fajardo has no doubt in her mind that Peñaflorida is indeed a hero. One of the co-founders of DTC, Fajardo says she knew from the start that her colleague would be included in the CNN shortlist. “He is a modern-day hero. He would use his meager salary to buy food for the kids. In fact, he had already pledged the prize money to the children he is helping, should he win," Fajardo said. But like a real hero who embodies humility, Peñaflorida refuses to take the credit for the honor given by CNN, much less brag about it. He says that his inclusion in the roster of 10 finalists is already an honor in itself. “This is not about me," he says. “If the people vote for me, they are actually voting for the poor kids DTC is teaching and the dedicated volunteers behind this work." Peñaflorida, fondly called Kuya F, distributes biscuits to the kids at a slum area in Cavite. DTC File Photo ‘Rainbow after the rain’
Peñaflorida views his inclusion in CNN’s Top 10 as the proverbial “rainbow after the rain" to Filipinos.
On October 2, the country was still reeling from the weeklong floods wrought by storm “Ondoy" when it braced itself anew to face typhoon “Pepeng’s" wrath.
Like many other citizens who volunteered for Ondoy-related relief operations, Peñaflorida joined others in packing and distributing donations to flood-stricken communities in Cavite. True to his mission, his pushcarts turned into relief carts used to collect donated goods.
Peñaflorida says that Anderson Cooper’s announcement of the Blue Ribbon Panel’s decision “gave Filipinos a breath of fresh air, a brief moment to cheer and celebrate, to be inspired all the more" to pursue volunteer work and rebuild our nation. The many heroes emerging from the Ondoy tragedy inspires Peñaflorida to devote more of himself to the disaster victims in his home province. “There are many people who rose to the occasion, but their stories remain untold. It’s an honor to represent a nation of heroes," Peñaflorida says. “Indeed, the Filipino is worth dying for," he adds, quoting the famous words of his personal hero, Ninoy Aquino. With Filipinos abuzz with Peñaflorida’s nomination, the young man recently visited the World Vision office one busy afternoon and was promptly hounded by media. He now confesses he is still unaccustomed to being thrust into the spotlight. Peñaflorida recalls that he and other DTC volunteers had to endure taunts and rejection for many years, while carrying out their mission. “We’ve experienced being degraded and unwanted, so we just had to bow our heads low while they shouted, ‘Here are the basureros (trash collectors)!’" Despite the difficulties of bringing education closer to impoverished youth, Peñaflorida finds fulfillment not in awards and other forms of official recognition – not even in the flattery by politicians who have started courting him for their election plans – but in the smiles of the children who rush to meet him when they spot his humble pushcart. Peñaflorida’s success is not your ordinary rags-to-riches story. While he is no longer hounded by the pangs of hunger and destitution, he continues to offer himself to the underprivileged as an example of a kid who fell victim to violence driven by poverty and yet found a way to lift himself up.
With heroes, the need to catalyze change always leads to endless possibilities. Even if the only possibility at first is to simply start pushing a pushcart. - GMANews.TV To vote for Efren Peñaflorida Jr. and view CNN’s Top 10 Heroes of 2009, click here..
GMANews.TV - Thursday, October 8
With an ocean of garbage as his playground as a child, Efren Peñaflorida Jr. was accustomed to living amid the ills of society. The slum area in Cavite province where he grew up abounded with solvent-sniffing kids and tough gangsters. People sifted through dumpsites during the day and slept in the cemetery’s empty crypts at night.
To vote for Peñaflorida as CNN Hero of the Year, click here. It was 1997. Peñaflorida, a gangling 16-year-old youngster back then, was occasionally bullied and beaten by street toughies. No one would have thought that, 12 years later, he would be short-listed by globally known Cable News Network (CNN) as a candidate for its CNN Heroes. “I grew up really poor. My father was a driver and my mother was a laundrywoman. When I went to school, I experienced being mocked, bullied, discriminated against," said Peñaflorida, the second of three children.
“I wanted to settle scores with the bullies. But I realized I could turn a bad experience into something positive." At the time, Peñaflorida was part of Club 8586, a youth group in Cavite. His mentor encouraged him to help curb the rampant gang wars and fraternity feuds in their communities, where kids as young as nine years were already involved in violent fights.
‘Pushcart classroom’ Despite having to cope with his own limited means, Peñaflorida formed the Dynamic Teen Company (DTC) with his two peers. The fledgling group ventured into work among destitute and out-of-school youth, teaching them basic literacy skills, values formation, and even personal hygiene. Armed only with plastic bags loaded with books and school supplies, Peñaflorida and his team roamed the shantytowns of Cavite, offering kids a unique chance to learn useful things in the “street classroom" setting.
Years later, the platform for their mobile classroom would evolve into pedicabs, and eventually into what it is today – a Kariton Klassrum (literally, “pushcart classroom"). The Kariton Klassrum now carries a mini-library, reading aids, blackboards, and even detachable tables and chairs. One of the mobile classrooms turns into a "relief cart" for Ondoy victims. DTC file photo Peñaflorida says that his commitment to teach basic literacy to kids is his way of “paying forward" – having been a scholar himself. His elementary and high school education was funded by World Vision Philippines, while his college education was shouldered by Club 8586. Not surprisingly, he took up a degree in Education.
Now 28, Peñaflorida earns a living as a public school teacher in Cavite. On Saturdays, he continues his pushcart classrooms –which have expanded into Manila – with other teen volunteers now reaching 2,000. Aside from teaching literacy, the group also conducts feeding programs for abandoned street kids who scavenge for food by sifting through heaps of garbage.
Who is a hero?
When the world-renowned Cable News Network (CNN) early this year called for submissions for its annual search for Heroes, Club 8586 nominated Peñaflorida.
The network’s Blue Ribbon Panel sifted through 9,000 nominees from over 100 countries, and soon narrowed down its choices to 28. On October 1 (October 2 in Manila), CNN announced its top 10 finalists for its Hero of the Year. Peñaflorida made the cut.
The word “hero" has been used so loosely, that these days even someone who performs a singular, momentary selfless act like jumping into a river to save a child is quickly declared a hero. But the same public recognition is not so easily earned by a person who performs the same heroic act, quietly and doggedly from day to day. Peñaflorida (in white) pushes for change. Hub Pacheco file photo Nonetheless, Rezcel Fajardo has no doubt in her mind that Peñaflorida is indeed a hero. One of the co-founders of DTC, Fajardo says she knew from the start that her colleague would be included in the CNN shortlist. “He is a modern-day hero. He would use his meager salary to buy food for the kids. In fact, he had already pledged the prize money to the children he is helping, should he win," Fajardo said. But like a real hero who embodies humility, Peñaflorida refuses to take the credit for the honor given by CNN, much less brag about it. He says that his inclusion in the roster of 10 finalists is already an honor in itself. “This is not about me," he says. “If the people vote for me, they are actually voting for the poor kids DTC is teaching and the dedicated volunteers behind this work." Peñaflorida, fondly called Kuya F, distributes biscuits to the kids at a slum area in Cavite. DTC File Photo ‘Rainbow after the rain’
Peñaflorida views his inclusion in CNN’s Top 10 as the proverbial “rainbow after the rain" to Filipinos.
On October 2, the country was still reeling from the weeklong floods wrought by storm “Ondoy" when it braced itself anew to face typhoon “Pepeng’s" wrath.
Like many other citizens who volunteered for Ondoy-related relief operations, Peñaflorida joined others in packing and distributing donations to flood-stricken communities in Cavite. True to his mission, his pushcarts turned into relief carts used to collect donated goods.
Peñaflorida says that Anderson Cooper’s announcement of the Blue Ribbon Panel’s decision “gave Filipinos a breath of fresh air, a brief moment to cheer and celebrate, to be inspired all the more" to pursue volunteer work and rebuild our nation. The many heroes emerging from the Ondoy tragedy inspires Peñaflorida to devote more of himself to the disaster victims in his home province. “There are many people who rose to the occasion, but their stories remain untold. It’s an honor to represent a nation of heroes," Peñaflorida says. “Indeed, the Filipino is worth dying for," he adds, quoting the famous words of his personal hero, Ninoy Aquino. With Filipinos abuzz with Peñaflorida’s nomination, the young man recently visited the World Vision office one busy afternoon and was promptly hounded by media. He now confesses he is still unaccustomed to being thrust into the spotlight. Peñaflorida recalls that he and other DTC volunteers had to endure taunts and rejection for many years, while carrying out their mission. “We’ve experienced being degraded and unwanted, so we just had to bow our heads low while they shouted, ‘Here are the basureros (trash collectors)!’" Despite the difficulties of bringing education closer to impoverished youth, Peñaflorida finds fulfillment not in awards and other forms of official recognition – not even in the flattery by politicians who have started courting him for their election plans – but in the smiles of the children who rush to meet him when they spot his humble pushcart. Peñaflorida’s success is not your ordinary rags-to-riches story. While he is no longer hounded by the pangs of hunger and destitution, he continues to offer himself to the underprivileged as an example of a kid who fell victim to violence driven by poverty and yet found a way to lift himself up.
With heroes, the need to catalyze change always leads to endless possibilities. Even if the only possibility at first is to simply start pushing a pushcart. - GMANews.TV To vote for Efren Peñaflorida Jr. and view CNN’s Top 10 Heroes of 2009, click here..
Father Kills, eats son's rival
OK - I read this today and thought; What is the world coming to? I currently live and reside in the Philippines and was disgusted by this. I thought this was only in the movies. I guess sometimes those fictional movies turn out to be non-fictional. Maybe there is another sequel. Hannibal rising in the Philippines?
I wonder if this guy looks like him except the Filipino version.
Father kills, eats son's rival
ABS-CBN - Thursday, October 8
Father kills, eats son's rival
A vengeful father in Naawan town in Misamis Oriental killed his son's rival, carved out meat from his body and shared it with his drinking buddies.
Senior Inspector Carlos Oliveros, Naawan police station chief, said residents found the remains of 16-year-old Rey Dadoles in a grassy portion of Barangay Mat-i last Friday.
Oliveros said Dadoles died after suffering 22 hack wounds. He said flesh was carved out of the boy's ribs and some of the body parts were also missing.
He said Dadoles was brutally killed by Jovencio Tuyor and three other persons.
"They took some parts of the boy's body. Tuyor ate the victim's flesh," Oliveros told ABS-CBN Misamis Oriental.
Tuyor admitted in an interview that he killed the boy. He said he only retaliated for his son, who was hit by the victim before the killing.
He also confessed to taking some body parts of the victim and sharing it with his drinking buddies as "kinilaw," a local dish of raw meat slightly cooked with vinegar and ginger.
Police said the three other suspects in the killing are now under protective custody.
A case of murder has been filed against the suspect. Report from Rod Bolivar, ABS-CBN Misamis Oriental
ABS-CBN - Thursday, October 8
Father kills, eats son's rival
A vengeful father in Naawan town in Misamis Oriental killed his son's rival, carved out meat from his body and shared it with his drinking buddies.
Senior Inspector Carlos Oliveros, Naawan police station chief, said residents found the remains of 16-year-old Rey Dadoles in a grassy portion of Barangay Mat-i last Friday.
Oliveros said Dadoles died after suffering 22 hack wounds. He said flesh was carved out of the boy's ribs and some of the body parts were also missing.
He said Dadoles was brutally killed by Jovencio Tuyor and three other persons.
"They took some parts of the boy's body. Tuyor ate the victim's flesh," Oliveros told ABS-CBN Misamis Oriental.
Tuyor admitted in an interview that he killed the boy. He said he only retaliated for his son, who was hit by the victim before the killing.
He also confessed to taking some body parts of the victim and sharing it with his drinking buddies as "kinilaw," a local dish of raw meat slightly cooked with vinegar and ginger.
Police said the three other suspects in the killing are now under protective custody.
A case of murder has been filed against the suspect. Report from Rod Bolivar, ABS-CBN Misamis Oriental
"Hannibal Lecter" -
More diabolical than Sherlock Holmes's arch nemesis Dr. Moriarty and more lethal than Jaws, Hannibal Lecter, the serial murderer created by author Thomas Harris, has captured the public's fascination like no other fictional character in recent years. Dr. Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter first appeared as a minor but important character in Harris's novel Red Dragon. In the next book, The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter came into his own, and the movie version highlighted the killer's complex relationship with FBI agent-in-training Clarice Starling. In these two novels, Lecter, in his indirect, Cheshire-Cat way, advises the FBI as they hunt for headline-making serial killers who are on the loose and very active. He himself is not the target of law enforcement's full-court press until Hannibal, the third book in this series. In Hannibal, Lecter is at large and up to his old tricks. His face altered by plastic surgery, he has taken a new identity and moved to Rome, an environment that better suits his cultivated tastes. Clarice Starling, now a full-fledged special agent, picks up his trail, hoping to recapture the wily psychoanalyst with a taste for human flesh.
Jodie Foster with Anthony Hopkins behind
But who is Hannibal Lecter? What real-life models did Harris use in creating him? How much of him is fiction and how much is based on fact? Is he purely a literary invention, or could someone like him actually be walking the streets right now?
Book cover: Silence of the Lambs
The portrait Harris paints of Dr. Lecter is vivid and terrifying. His eyes are maroon in color, and his voice has a hint of a metallic rasp. His teeth are small and white. A mature man well into middle age, Lecter is small and compact, and moves with unusual grace and silence. He has six fingers on one hand, the middle finger "perfectly replicated... the rarest form of polydactyly." His sense of smell is highly developed as exhibited by his ability to detect Clarice Starling's brand of perfume—L'Air du Temps—on their first meeting in The Silence of the Lambs, even though she hadn't worn any that day.
Hannibal in his cage
Before he was caught, he was a respected psychiatrist and patron of the arts in Baltimore, Maryland. He was born in eastern Europe to an aristocratic family but suffered unspeakable hardship as a boy during World War II. Fourteen homicides have been attributed to him, though authorities suspect that there were probably others.
These are the "facts" of Thomas Harris's master creation, but was there a real-life model that Harris used for Lecter? Harris rarely gives interviews and prefers to let his work speak for itself. It's known that he did research at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (now called the Investigative Support Unit) when writing these books and learned the specifics of serial murderers and their habits from real profilers. How much did he take from the case files he was allowed to review and how much came from his own imagination?
Since the author will not tell us (and frankly what author would?), perhaps we can sleuth this out the way a profiler would—start with what we know about Lecter and build a profile on him that we can compare to other real-life serial killers.
(For the purpose of this analysis, I will use only the literary Hannibal Lecter, the version of him that appears in the novels. As good as some of the cinematic portrayals have been—particularly Anthony Hopkins's bone-chilling interpretation—it will be more beneficial to work from the primary source material.)
"Hannibal Lecter, M.D. is a fictional character in a series of novels by author Thomas Harris. Lecter is introduced in the thriller novel Red Dragon as a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer. This novel and its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs, feature Lecter as one of two primary antagonists. In the third novel, Hannibal, Lecter becomes the main character. His role as protagonist occurs in the fourth novel, Hannibal Rising, which explores his childhood and development into a serial killer. Lecter's character also appears in all five film adaptations.
The first movie, Manhunter, was loosely based on Red Dragon, and features Brian Cox as Lecter, spelled as "Lecktor". In 2002, a second adaptation of Red Dragon was made under the original title, featuring Anthony Hopkins, who had previously played Lecter in the motion pictures The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. Hopkins won an Academy Award for his performance of the character in The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 despite the fact that he only appeared on screen for 16 minutes in the entire film. In 2003, Hannibal Lecter (as portrayed by Hopkins) was voted by The American Film Institute to be the most memorable villain in film history.[2]"
Friday, October 2, 2009
Market Crash
Just as I said in April this year - look for a spring summer rally then when most of us think things are looking up - boom. Here we go again. History repeats itself. Will no one ever learn. I know - we were all disillusioned to believe things were getting better. Lets get serious - can we recover from all this chaos in that short of a period of time.
I think I will head to the roller coaster park as I can pick my rides of the ups and downs and decide not to ride anymore.
I think I will head to the roller coaster park as I can pick my rides of the ups and downs and decide not to ride anymore.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Rise of the Super-Rich hits a sobering wall
Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall
The rich have been getting richer for so long that the trend has come to seem almost permanent.They began to pull away from everyone else in the 1970s. By 2006, income was more concentrated at the top than it had been since the late 1920s. The recent news about resurgent Wall Street pay has seemed to suggest that not even the Great Recession could reverse the rise in income inequality.But economists say - and data is beginning to show - that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon.For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs — as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.The relative struggles of the rich may elicit little sympathy from less well-off families who are dealing with the effects of the worst recession in a generation. But the change does raise several broader economic questions. Among them is whether harder times for the rich will ultimately benefit the middle class and the poor, given that the huge recent increase in top incomes coincided with slow income growth for almost every other group. In blunter terms, the question is whether the better metaphor for the economy is a rising tide that can lift all boats - or a zero-sum game.Just how much poorer the rich will become remains unclear. It will be determined by, among other things, whether the stock market continues its recent rally and what new laws Congress passes in the wake of the financial crisis. At the very least, though, the rich seem unlikely to return to the trajectory they were on.Last year, the number of Americans with a net worth of at least $30 million dropped 24 percent, according to CapGemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. Monthly income from stock dividends, which is concentrated among the affluent, has fallen more than 20 percent since last summer, the biggest such decline since the government began keeping records in 1959.Bill Gates, Warren E. Buffett, the heirs to the Wal-Mart Stores fortune and the founders of Google each lost billions last year, according to Forbes magazine. In one stark example, John McAfee, an entrepreneur who founded the antivirus software company that bears his name, is now worth about $4 million, from a peak of more than $100 million. Mr. McAfee will soon auction off his last big property because he needs cash to pay his bills after having been caught off guard by the simultaneous crash in real estate and stocks."I had no clue," he said, "that there would be this tandem collapse."Some of the clearest signs of the reversal of fortunes can be found in data on spending by the wealthy. An index that tracks the price of art, the Mei Moses index, has dropped 32 percent in the last six months. The New York Yankees failed to sell many of the most expensive tickets in their new stadium and had to drop the price. In one ZIP code in Vail, Colo., only five homes sold for more than $2 million in the first half of this year, down from 34 in the first half of 2007, according to MDA Dataquick. In Bronxville, an affluent New York suburb, the decline was to two, from 17, according to Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage."We had a period of roughly 50 years, from 1929 to 1979, when the income distribution tended to flatten," said Neal Soss, the chief economist at Credit Suisse. "Since the early '80s, incomes have tended to get less equal. And I think we've entered a phase now where society will move to a more equal distribution."No More '50s and '60sFew economists expect the country to return to the relatively flat income distribution of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, they say that inequality is likely to remain significantly greater than it was for most of the 20th century. The Obama administration has not proposed completely rewriting the rules for Wall Street or raising the top income-tax rate to anywhere near 70 percent, its level as recently as 1980. Market forces that have increased inequality, like globalization, are also not going away.But economists say that the rich will probably not recover their losses immediately, as they did in the wake of the dot-com crash earlier this decade. That quick recovery came courtesy of a new bubble in stocks, which in 2007 were more expensive by some measures than they had been at any other point save the bull markets of the 1920s or 1990s. This time, analysts say, Wall Street seems unlikely to return soon to the extreme levels of borrowing that made such a bubble possible.Any major shift in the financial status of the rich could have big implications. A drop in their income and wealth would complicate life for elite universities, museums and other institutions that received lavish donations in recent decades. Governments - federal and state - could struggle, too, because they rely heavily on the taxes paid by the affluent.Perhaps the broadest question is what a hit to the wealthy would mean for the middle class and the poor. The best-known data on the rich comes from an analysis of Internal Revenue Service returns by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two economists. Their work shows that in the late 1970s, the cutoff to qualify for the highest-earning one ten-thousandth of households was roughly $2 million, in inflation-adjusted, pretax terms. By 2007, it had jumped to $11.5 million.The gains for the merely affluent were also big, if not quite huge. The cutoff to be in the top 1 percent doubled since the late 1970s, to roughly $400,000.By contrast, pay at the median - which was about $50,000 in 2007 - rose less than 20 percent, Census data shows. Near the bottom of the income distribution, the increase was about 12 percent.Some economists say they believe that the contrasting trends are unrelated. If anything, these economists say, any problems the wealthy have will trickle down, in the form of less charitable giving and less consumer spending. Over the last century, the worst years for the rich were the early 1930s, the heart of the Great Depression.Other economists say the recent explosion of incomes at the top did hurt everyone else, by concentrating economic and political power among a relatively small group."I think incredibly high incomes can have a pernicious effect on the polity and the economy," said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. Much of the growth of high-end incomes stemmed from market forces, like technological innovation, Mr. Katz said. But a significant amount also stemmed from the wealthy's newfound ability to win favorable government contracts, low tax rates and weak financial regulation, he added.The I.R.S. has not yet released its data for 2008 or 2009. But Mr. Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said he believed that the rich had become poorer. Asked to speculate where the cutoff for the top one ten-thousandth of households was now, he said from $6 million to $8 million.For the number to return to $11 million quickly, he said, would probably require a large financial bubble.Making More MoneyThe United States economy experienced two such bubbles in recent years - one in stocks, the other in real estate - and both helped the rich become richer. Mr. McAfee, whose tattoos and tinted hair suggest an independent streak, is an extreme but telling example. For two decades, at almost every step of his career, he figured out a way to make more money.In the late 1980s, he founded McAfee Associates, the antivirus software company. It gave away its software, unlike its rivals, but charged fees to those who wanted any kind of technical support. That decision helped make it a huge success. The company went public in 1992, in the early years of one of biggest stock market booms in history.But Mr. McAfee is, by his own description, an atypical businessman - easily bored and given to serial obsessions. As a young man, he traveled through Mexico, India and Nepal and, more recently, he wrote a book called, "Into the Heart of Truth: The Spirit of Relational Yoga." Two years after McAfee Associates went public, he was bored again.So he sold his remaining stake, bringing his gains to about $100 million. In the coming years, he started new projects and made more investments. Almost inevitably, they paid off."History told me that you just keep working, and it is easy to make more money," he said, sitting in the kitchen of his adobe-style house in the southwest corner of New Mexico. With low tax rates, he added, the rich could keep much of what they made.One of the starkest patterns in the data on inequality is the extent to which the incomes of the very rich are tied to the stock market. They have risen most rapidly during the biggest bull markets: in the 1920s and the 20 years starting in 1987."We are coming from an abnormal period where a tremendous amount of wealth was created largely by selling assets back and forth," said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, one of the country's largest bond traders, and the former manager of Harvard's endowment.Some of this wealth was based on real economic gains, like those from the computer revolution. But much of it was not, Mr. El-Erian said. "You had wealth creation that could not be tied to the underlying economy," he added, "and the benefits were very skewed: they went to the assets of the rich. It was financial engineering."But if the rich have done well in bubbles, they have taken enormous hits to their wealth during busts. A recent study by two Northwestern University economists found that the incomes of the affluent tend to fall more, in percentage terms, in recessions than the incomes of the middle class. The incomes of the very affluent - the top one ten-thousandth - fall the most.Over the last several years, Mr. McAfee began to put a large chunk of his fortune into real estate, often in remote locations. He bought the house in New Mexico as a playground for himself and fellow aerotrekkers, people who fly unlicensed, open-cockpit planes. On a 157-acre spread, he built a general store, a 35-seat movie theater and a cafe, and he bought vintage cars for his visitors to use.He continued to invest in financial markets, sometimes borrowing money to increase the potential returns. He typically chose his investments based on suggestions from his financial advisers. One of their recommendations was to put millions of dollars into bonds tied to Lehman Brothers.For a while, Mr. McAfee's good run, like that of many of the American wealthy, seemed to continue. In the wake of the dot-com crash, stocks started rising again, while house prices just continued to rise. Outside's Go magazine and National Geographic Adventure ran articles on his New Mexico property, leading to him to believe that "this was the hottest property on the planet," he said.But then things began to change.In 2007, Mr. McAfee sold a 10,000-square-foot home in Colorado with a view of Pike's Peak. He had spent $25 million to buy the property and build the house. He received $5.7 million for it. When Lehman collapsed last fall, its bonds became virtually worthless. Mr. McAfee's stock investments cost him millions more.One day, he realized, as he said, "Whoa, my cash is gone."His remaining net worth of about $4 million makes him vastly wealthier than most Americans, of course. But he has nonetheless found himself needing cash and desperately trying to reduce his monthly expenses.He has sold a 10-passenger Cessna jet and now flies coach. This week his oceanfront estate in Hawaii sold for $1.5 million, with only a handful of bidders at the auction. He plans to spend much of his time in Belize, in part because of more favorable taxes there.Next week, his New Mexico property will be the subject of a no-floor auction, meaning that Mr. McAfee has promised to accept the top bid, no matter how low it is."I am trying to face up to the reality here that the auction may bring next to nothing," he said.In the past, when his stock investments did poorly, he sold real estate and replenished his cash. This time, that has not been an option.Stock Market MysteryThe possibility that the stock market will quickly recover from its collapse, as it did earlier this decade, is perhaps the biggest uncertainty about the financial condition of the wealthy. Since March, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has risen 49 percent.Yet Wall Street still has a long way to go before reaching its previous peaks. The S.& P. 500 remains 35 percent below its 2007 high. Aggregate compensation for the financial sector fell 14 percent from 2007 to 2008, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association - far less than profits or revenue fell, but a decline nonetheless."The difference this time," predicted Byron R. Wein, a former chief investment strategist at Morgan Stanley, who started working on Wall Street in 1965, "is that the high-water mark that people reached in 2007 is not going to be exceeded for a very long time."Without a financial bubble, there will simply be less money available for Wall Street to pay itself or for corporate chief executives to pay themselves. Some companies - like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, which face less competition now and have been helped by the government's attempts to prop up credit markets - will still hand out enormous paychecks. Over all, though, there will be fewer such checks, analysts say. Roger Freeman, an analyst at Barclays Capital, said he thought that overall Wall Street compensation would, at most, increase moderately over the next couple of years.Beyond the stock market, government policy may have the biggest effect on top incomes. Mr. Katz, the Harvard economist, argues that without policy changes, top incomes may indeed approach their old highs in the coming years. Historically, government policy, like the New Deal, has had more lasting effects on the rich than financial busts, he said.One looming policy issue today is what steps Congress and the administration will take to re-regulate financial markets. A second issue is taxes.In the three decades after World War II, when the incomes of the rich grew more slowly than those of the middle class, the top marginal rate ranged from 70 to 91 percent. Mr. Piketty, one of the economists who analyzed the I.R.S. data, argues that these high rates did not affect merely post-tax income. They also helped hold down the pretax incomes of the wealthy, he says, by giving them less incentive to make many millions of dollars.Since 1980, tax rates on the affluent have fallen more than rates on any other group; this year, the top marginal rate is 35 percent. President Obama has proposed raising it to 39 percent and has said he would consider a surtax on families making more than $1 million a year, which could push the top rate above 40 percent.What any policy changes will mean for the nonwealthy remains unclear. There have certainly been periods when the rich, the middle class and the poor all have done well (like the late 1990s), as well as periods when all have done poorly (like the last year). For much of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, both the middle class and the wealthy received raises that outpaced inflation.Yet there is also a reason to think that the incomes of the wealthy could potentially have a bigger impact on others than in the past: as a share of the economy, they are vastly larger than they once were.In 2007, the top one ten-thousandth of households took home 6 percent of the nation's income, up from 0.9 percent in 1977. It was the highest such level since at least 1913, the first year for which the I.R.S. has data.The top 1 percent of earners took home 23.5 percent of income, up from 9 percent three decades earlier.
by David Leonhardt and Geraldine Fabrikant
The rich have been getting richer for so long that the trend has come to seem almost permanent.They began to pull away from everyone else in the 1970s. By 2006, income was more concentrated at the top than it had been since the late 1920s. The recent news about resurgent Wall Street pay has seemed to suggest that not even the Great Recession could reverse the rise in income inequality.But economists say - and data is beginning to show - that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon.For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs — as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.The relative struggles of the rich may elicit little sympathy from less well-off families who are dealing with the effects of the worst recession in a generation. But the change does raise several broader economic questions. Among them is whether harder times for the rich will ultimately benefit the middle class and the poor, given that the huge recent increase in top incomes coincided with slow income growth for almost every other group. In blunter terms, the question is whether the better metaphor for the economy is a rising tide that can lift all boats - or a zero-sum game.Just how much poorer the rich will become remains unclear. It will be determined by, among other things, whether the stock market continues its recent rally and what new laws Congress passes in the wake of the financial crisis. At the very least, though, the rich seem unlikely to return to the trajectory they were on.Last year, the number of Americans with a net worth of at least $30 million dropped 24 percent, according to CapGemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. Monthly income from stock dividends, which is concentrated among the affluent, has fallen more than 20 percent since last summer, the biggest such decline since the government began keeping records in 1959.Bill Gates, Warren E. Buffett, the heirs to the Wal-Mart Stores fortune and the founders of Google each lost billions last year, according to Forbes magazine. In one stark example, John McAfee, an entrepreneur who founded the antivirus software company that bears his name, is now worth about $4 million, from a peak of more than $100 million. Mr. McAfee will soon auction off his last big property because he needs cash to pay his bills after having been caught off guard by the simultaneous crash in real estate and stocks."I had no clue," he said, "that there would be this tandem collapse."Some of the clearest signs of the reversal of fortunes can be found in data on spending by the wealthy. An index that tracks the price of art, the Mei Moses index, has dropped 32 percent in the last six months. The New York Yankees failed to sell many of the most expensive tickets in their new stadium and had to drop the price. In one ZIP code in Vail, Colo., only five homes sold for more than $2 million in the first half of this year, down from 34 in the first half of 2007, according to MDA Dataquick. In Bronxville, an affluent New York suburb, the decline was to two, from 17, according to Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage."We had a period of roughly 50 years, from 1929 to 1979, when the income distribution tended to flatten," said Neal Soss, the chief economist at Credit Suisse. "Since the early '80s, incomes have tended to get less equal. And I think we've entered a phase now where society will move to a more equal distribution."No More '50s and '60sFew economists expect the country to return to the relatively flat income distribution of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, they say that inequality is likely to remain significantly greater than it was for most of the 20th century. The Obama administration has not proposed completely rewriting the rules for Wall Street or raising the top income-tax rate to anywhere near 70 percent, its level as recently as 1980. Market forces that have increased inequality, like globalization, are also not going away.But economists say that the rich will probably not recover their losses immediately, as they did in the wake of the dot-com crash earlier this decade. That quick recovery came courtesy of a new bubble in stocks, which in 2007 were more expensive by some measures than they had been at any other point save the bull markets of the 1920s or 1990s. This time, analysts say, Wall Street seems unlikely to return soon to the extreme levels of borrowing that made such a bubble possible.Any major shift in the financial status of the rich could have big implications. A drop in their income and wealth would complicate life for elite universities, museums and other institutions that received lavish donations in recent decades. Governments - federal and state - could struggle, too, because they rely heavily on the taxes paid by the affluent.Perhaps the broadest question is what a hit to the wealthy would mean for the middle class and the poor. The best-known data on the rich comes from an analysis of Internal Revenue Service returns by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two economists. Their work shows that in the late 1970s, the cutoff to qualify for the highest-earning one ten-thousandth of households was roughly $2 million, in inflation-adjusted, pretax terms. By 2007, it had jumped to $11.5 million.The gains for the merely affluent were also big, if not quite huge. The cutoff to be in the top 1 percent doubled since the late 1970s, to roughly $400,000.By contrast, pay at the median - which was about $50,000 in 2007 - rose less than 20 percent, Census data shows. Near the bottom of the income distribution, the increase was about 12 percent.Some economists say they believe that the contrasting trends are unrelated. If anything, these economists say, any problems the wealthy have will trickle down, in the form of less charitable giving and less consumer spending. Over the last century, the worst years for the rich were the early 1930s, the heart of the Great Depression.Other economists say the recent explosion of incomes at the top did hurt everyone else, by concentrating economic and political power among a relatively small group."I think incredibly high incomes can have a pernicious effect on the polity and the economy," said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. Much of the growth of high-end incomes stemmed from market forces, like technological innovation, Mr. Katz said. But a significant amount also stemmed from the wealthy's newfound ability to win favorable government contracts, low tax rates and weak financial regulation, he added.The I.R.S. has not yet released its data for 2008 or 2009. But Mr. Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said he believed that the rich had become poorer. Asked to speculate where the cutoff for the top one ten-thousandth of households was now, he said from $6 million to $8 million.For the number to return to $11 million quickly, he said, would probably require a large financial bubble.Making More MoneyThe United States economy experienced two such bubbles in recent years - one in stocks, the other in real estate - and both helped the rich become richer. Mr. McAfee, whose tattoos and tinted hair suggest an independent streak, is an extreme but telling example. For two decades, at almost every step of his career, he figured out a way to make more money.In the late 1980s, he founded McAfee Associates, the antivirus software company. It gave away its software, unlike its rivals, but charged fees to those who wanted any kind of technical support. That decision helped make it a huge success. The company went public in 1992, in the early years of one of biggest stock market booms in history.But Mr. McAfee is, by his own description, an atypical businessman - easily bored and given to serial obsessions. As a young man, he traveled through Mexico, India and Nepal and, more recently, he wrote a book called, "Into the Heart of Truth: The Spirit of Relational Yoga." Two years after McAfee Associates went public, he was bored again.So he sold his remaining stake, bringing his gains to about $100 million. In the coming years, he started new projects and made more investments. Almost inevitably, they paid off."History told me that you just keep working, and it is easy to make more money," he said, sitting in the kitchen of his adobe-style house in the southwest corner of New Mexico. With low tax rates, he added, the rich could keep much of what they made.One of the starkest patterns in the data on inequality is the extent to which the incomes of the very rich are tied to the stock market. They have risen most rapidly during the biggest bull markets: in the 1920s and the 20 years starting in 1987."We are coming from an abnormal period where a tremendous amount of wealth was created largely by selling assets back and forth," said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, one of the country's largest bond traders, and the former manager of Harvard's endowment.Some of this wealth was based on real economic gains, like those from the computer revolution. But much of it was not, Mr. El-Erian said. "You had wealth creation that could not be tied to the underlying economy," he added, "and the benefits were very skewed: they went to the assets of the rich. It was financial engineering."But if the rich have done well in bubbles, they have taken enormous hits to their wealth during busts. A recent study by two Northwestern University economists found that the incomes of the affluent tend to fall more, in percentage terms, in recessions than the incomes of the middle class. The incomes of the very affluent - the top one ten-thousandth - fall the most.Over the last several years, Mr. McAfee began to put a large chunk of his fortune into real estate, often in remote locations. He bought the house in New Mexico as a playground for himself and fellow aerotrekkers, people who fly unlicensed, open-cockpit planes. On a 157-acre spread, he built a general store, a 35-seat movie theater and a cafe, and he bought vintage cars for his visitors to use.He continued to invest in financial markets, sometimes borrowing money to increase the potential returns. He typically chose his investments based on suggestions from his financial advisers. One of their recommendations was to put millions of dollars into bonds tied to Lehman Brothers.For a while, Mr. McAfee's good run, like that of many of the American wealthy, seemed to continue. In the wake of the dot-com crash, stocks started rising again, while house prices just continued to rise. Outside's Go magazine and National Geographic Adventure ran articles on his New Mexico property, leading to him to believe that "this was the hottest property on the planet," he said.But then things began to change.In 2007, Mr. McAfee sold a 10,000-square-foot home in Colorado with a view of Pike's Peak. He had spent $25 million to buy the property and build the house. He received $5.7 million for it. When Lehman collapsed last fall, its bonds became virtually worthless. Mr. McAfee's stock investments cost him millions more.One day, he realized, as he said, "Whoa, my cash is gone."His remaining net worth of about $4 million makes him vastly wealthier than most Americans, of course. But he has nonetheless found himself needing cash and desperately trying to reduce his monthly expenses.He has sold a 10-passenger Cessna jet and now flies coach. This week his oceanfront estate in Hawaii sold for $1.5 million, with only a handful of bidders at the auction. He plans to spend much of his time in Belize, in part because of more favorable taxes there.Next week, his New Mexico property will be the subject of a no-floor auction, meaning that Mr. McAfee has promised to accept the top bid, no matter how low it is."I am trying to face up to the reality here that the auction may bring next to nothing," he said.In the past, when his stock investments did poorly, he sold real estate and replenished his cash. This time, that has not been an option.Stock Market MysteryThe possibility that the stock market will quickly recover from its collapse, as it did earlier this decade, is perhaps the biggest uncertainty about the financial condition of the wealthy. Since March, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has risen 49 percent.Yet Wall Street still has a long way to go before reaching its previous peaks. The S.& P. 500 remains 35 percent below its 2007 high. Aggregate compensation for the financial sector fell 14 percent from 2007 to 2008, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association - far less than profits or revenue fell, but a decline nonetheless."The difference this time," predicted Byron R. Wein, a former chief investment strategist at Morgan Stanley, who started working on Wall Street in 1965, "is that the high-water mark that people reached in 2007 is not going to be exceeded for a very long time."Without a financial bubble, there will simply be less money available for Wall Street to pay itself or for corporate chief executives to pay themselves. Some companies - like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, which face less competition now and have been helped by the government's attempts to prop up credit markets - will still hand out enormous paychecks. Over all, though, there will be fewer such checks, analysts say. Roger Freeman, an analyst at Barclays Capital, said he thought that overall Wall Street compensation would, at most, increase moderately over the next couple of years.Beyond the stock market, government policy may have the biggest effect on top incomes. Mr. Katz, the Harvard economist, argues that without policy changes, top incomes may indeed approach their old highs in the coming years. Historically, government policy, like the New Deal, has had more lasting effects on the rich than financial busts, he said.One looming policy issue today is what steps Congress and the administration will take to re-regulate financial markets. A second issue is taxes.In the three decades after World War II, when the incomes of the rich grew more slowly than those of the middle class, the top marginal rate ranged from 70 to 91 percent. Mr. Piketty, one of the economists who analyzed the I.R.S. data, argues that these high rates did not affect merely post-tax income. They also helped hold down the pretax incomes of the wealthy, he says, by giving them less incentive to make many millions of dollars.Since 1980, tax rates on the affluent have fallen more than rates on any other group; this year, the top marginal rate is 35 percent. President Obama has proposed raising it to 39 percent and has said he would consider a surtax on families making more than $1 million a year, which could push the top rate above 40 percent.What any policy changes will mean for the nonwealthy remains unclear. There have certainly been periods when the rich, the middle class and the poor all have done well (like the late 1990s), as well as periods when all have done poorly (like the last year). For much of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, both the middle class and the wealthy received raises that outpaced inflation.Yet there is also a reason to think that the incomes of the wealthy could potentially have a bigger impact on others than in the past: as a share of the economy, they are vastly larger than they once were.In 2007, the top one ten-thousandth of households took home 6 percent of the nation's income, up from 0.9 percent in 1977. It was the highest such level since at least 1913, the first year for which the I.R.S. has data.The top 1 percent of earners took home 23.5 percent of income, up from 9 percent three decades earlier.
by David Leonhardt and Geraldine Fabrikant
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
