The economic crisis may be doing what pastors, family therapists and matrimonial counselors have long struggled to accomplish: keeping troubled marriages together.
Marriage counselors and divorce lawyers nationwide say more distressed couples are putting off divorce because the cost of splitting up is prohibitive in a time of stagnant salaries, plummeting home values and rising unemployment.
While the stress of economic uncertainty often worsens already shaky unions, it also can make couples more financially dependent on each other, said Pamela Smock, a researcher at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
President-elect Barack Obama thinks bank executives should forgo their bonuses this year to show they are taking responsibility amid difficult economic times.
… Obama said bank executives should make sacrifices because so many other people are struggling as the U.S. economy slips further. Some financial firms, including Goldman Sachs, the Swiss bank UBS and the British bank Barclays, have said they are not handing out annual bonuses to top executives, and Obama encouraged more to follow.
“I think that if you are already worth tens of millions of dollars, and you are having to lay off workers,” Obama said, “the least you can do is say, ‘I’m willing to make some sacrifice as well, because I recognize that there are people who are a lot less well off, who are going through some pretty tough times.’”
With the recent news on Wall Street, I have been hearing many concerns about our organization’s situation and wanted to take this opportunity to detail what we are doing from the top.
First, there will be no layoffs.
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In the Travel and Entertainment category, you will find that fewer requests to eat in restaurants will be approved, and requests for desserts in restaurants, particularly, will not be approved (unless they are included in the cost of a kid’s meal). In the case of Cabot’s or The Cheesecake Factory, where ice cream or cheesecake, respectively, is kind of the point, sharing is strongly encouraged. An additional benefit of this will be improved health. Netflix has been put on hold for 90 days, and we will reconsider that offering then; unopened red envelopes left on top of the TV indicate a lack of demand at present. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions are subject to elimination as well. Executives, including myself, are being asked to purchase regular coffee in place of more expensive coffee drinks while traveling, and to utilize meals from our on-site food service provider whenever possible.
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Lastly, note that we have no plans to add human resources. Requests for non-human resources (i.e., pets) may be considered in a future fiscal year.
That’s not how much you get. That’s your share of the debt that the government’s racking up for this bailout alone. Bloomberg.com puts the bailout into perspective…
The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
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The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Bob Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Vineland, New Jersey-based Cumberland Advisors Inc. and an economist for the Atlanta Fed for 10 years until January. “The backlash has begun already. Congress is taking a lot of hits from their constituents because they got snookered on the TARP big time. There’s a lot of supposedly smart people who look to be totally incompetent and it’s all going to fall on the taxpayer.”
AIG, Citibank and a number of other federally bailed-out financial institutions have no plans to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in sports team sponsorships, even as they take billions in taxpayer support, ABC News has found.
In boom times, the sponsorships were seen as a way to advertise the firms’ “brands” and appeal to potential customers. Even today, at least one bank told ABC News that a naming deal was increasing its revenue. But critics, including a member of Congress, say the decision to continue them now is hard to defend.
Struggling Citibank just sealed a multi-billion-dollar emergency “backstop” deal with the U.S. government. The financial behemoth, suffering with billions in bad mortgage-related assets on its books, recently shed 53,000 workers and saw its stock price lose over half its value. Yet it’s in a 20-year contract to pay the New York Mets $400 million to name the team’s new stadium “Citi Field.”
“This type of spending is indefensible and unacceptable to Citigroup’s new partner and largest investor: the American taxpayer,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., in a statement Monday.
Citi isn’t alone: Imploding insurance giant AIG is paying the British soccer team Manchester United $125 million for the privilege of having its logo appear on Man U’s uniforms. That, despite the fact the firm is standing largely thanks to a $150 billion lifeline from the U.S. Treasury.
“A friend of mine joked they should put ‘US Treasury’ on the front of their uniforms,” said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan watchdog group which is outraged by the expenditures.
Peter Schiff, who CNBC dubbed as “the man who called the collapse” (after mocking his predictions prior to the collapse), offers his forecast of the economy in the near term and it’s not very encouraging at all:
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Even though Schiff was proven right following two years of warning of the impending crisis, other Wall Street prognosticators just don’t want to listen even now. You think they would have learned their lesson after mocking him the first time around.
Mike at Okiedoke has a bailout proposal that I can really get behind:
If we leave it to Congress, CEO’s and lobbyists, we will just get evermore bits of amended gobblity-goop that results in endless taxpayer debt to bolster bad business practices.
So here’s my one-size-fits-all, nationwide socialist, U.S. corporate bailout proposal:
Remove government subsidies, tax breaks and loopholes for business.
Institute basic national single-payer health insurance for workers and families.
The country is going deeper in debt anyway, so wouldn’t it be better to use it to help U.S. companies and give health care to Americans, than just give it to the same people who created the mess? *
The debate over whether or not to bail out the Big Three is creating a divide between the North and the South:
Should taxpayers in Alabama be required to bail out automakers whose plants are concentrated in Northern states like Michigan and Ohio?
… Sen. Jeff Sessions, R- Ala., told reporters Wednesday, “I can not imagine a real justification for a worker in Alabama who does not have any health insurance at his company to be taxed to maintain a Cadillac health care plan for somebody in Detroit.”
Seems like a fair question, I suppose. But one might ask a similar question when it comes to federal aid to disaster-prone areas in the South: Should homeowners in the North be taxed to rebuild homes in the South that are in areas known to suffer from periodic major natural disasters, like hurricanes, tornadoes or massive flooding?
As someone who leaves in a disaster-prone area of the country that’s received federal aid in the past after major natural disasters, I certainly appreciate the assistance of the federal government to areas devastated and unable to cope with the huge financial toll of such a disaster. I certainly think we as a country have some duty to assist our fellow Americans who may be facing a monumental financial disaster resulting from the impending major collapse of one or more major manufacturing companies that have historically been a bedrock of the U.S. economy.
Do I think there should be a bailout of the Big Three? Not in the manner in which they want it — with few strings attached and without a major restructuring of their companies. I don’t know what the best answer is. I’m more inclined to favor a bailout package that protects the workers and let’s the companies face the consequences of their extremely poor management over the last couple of decades.
In any case, this debate has created some interesting arguments, bedfellows and dividing lines. But, rather than diligently working on some sort of solution, Congress once again defers it to another day, leaving the problem for the next Congress and the next administration to deal with. Hopefully it won’t be too late in this fragile economic climate to come up with some sort of fix before it creates an even greater problem in the larger economy.
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