Good move: Goldman Sachs executives are forgoing their annual bonuses. First time in the firm’s 139-year history, but it’s the right thing to do.
New York State will take the tax hit:
The executives complied with the urging of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and others who said in November that major Wall Street companies benefiting from federal bailouts shouldn’t pay out the usual huge bonuses to executives.
Paterson says it was the right thing to do, but the result is a further hit to the fiscal crisis of state government.
“Things could go even more south in a big hurry,” Paterson told reporters.
Losing tax revenue from bonuses was a big hit to New York’s finances because Wall Street taxes accounted for 30 percent of state revenue in the last fiscal quarter.
“I think it was the right urge,” he said, but “the state lost $178 million in that moment.”
The decision by Goldman Sachs’ top executives to forgo bonuses in 2008 forced other investment bank bosses to follow suit. Thousands of lower-tier brokers will still collect their hefty bonuses, however, because their employers don’t want to lose their top talent.
Certainly a more positive move than flying, then driving (sort of), from Detroit to Washington earlier this month for the CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler.
Ford Motor Company, in turning down the government bailout offer, scored big in terms of public opinion.
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Computerworld is reporting Apple’s having the most success selling to businesses since the late 80’s:
In a just-published survey, 68% of some 700 companies polled said they will allow their end users to deploy Macs as their work systems in the next 12 months. That’s exactly double the percentage of businesses that answered the same question eight months ago, said Laura DiDio, an analyst at Information Technology Intelligence Corp. (ITIC).
“And Apple hasn’t done anything to actively promote this,” DiDio said. Instead, faced by users “begging to use a Mac,” IT managers are reacting to the “consumerization” of technology in the enterprise, she explained.
“It used to be that business computers were more powerful than the ones at home,” DiDio noted, “but just the opposite is happening now. The computers at home are more powerful than those in the office.” And users want that power where they work.
It’s about time! People love their Apple products — whether they be iPhones, MacBooks, iMacs or iPods (they’re actually little computers, too). Since so many now have Apple products at home, they want “the good stuff” at work.
I still have my Macintosh Plus — can’t part with it as it’s almost an antique. In fact, I was using it for creating and editing Quark XPress documents up until 1995. It wasn’t easy working with that small screen, but it worked! Got an iMac a while back (G3), and we’re about ready for an upgrade, with iPhones for the whole family. How can we afford it? Perhaps the $99 iPhone rumors are true after all. Talked to an AT&T rep at a Walmart this afternoon and he was coy about it (“…after the New Year, you never know…”).
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