OT: Is this the end of General Electric?

[Katatonic]

the scary thing i see now is what the poster commented above, now white collar jobs are being outsourced. we all know a lot of manufacturing jobs left in the 80, 90, and 2000s but now you are seeing engineering, accounting, business administration jobs being outsourced to India and Asia. you cannot have an economy based on purely service industry jobs as that is like in breeding as there is no source of outside income coming in to support. it is truly a worldwide economy now with the huge advances in IT over the past 5 years where now you can share everything in the cloud and video conferencing making outsourcing overseas so much more simple. Now you can pay a white collar worker $10-$12 an hour in India or Poland or Southeast Asia and that is who the competition is for american jobs.

And not just outsourcing, but increased automation.

1. Cant compare average ceos in the 50s to today. Companies are 50 to 100x the size. Whether or not that means the ceo should be paid 10x more than then I dont know.

Size really doesn't have much correlation to what a CEO should make.

But that was always argument which helped fuel the M&A craze during the 1980s and 1990s, companies sometimes entering totally disparate industries/fields.

How 'bout this - let's just look at the auto industry, in particular, the 2 domestic makes that are still standing, GM and Ford.

GM and Ford employ a lot less people and make a lot fewer autos than they did decades ago (GM having pretty much abandoned markets like Europe, Russia, Japan, etc.), and yet their top brass are making many multiples of what the top execs did during the 1960s and 1970s.

2. The issue was that we did raise taxes on corps and they began moving... where? To our $hitty brother Canada of all places. So as we were increasing tax rates we were strsngling our corps out of the country.

Companies can't escape tax on income generated in the US (but, of course, can dwindle that down due to all the tax write-downs and exemptions).

Even w/ the lowered corporate tax rate, that still hasn't stopped companies from engaging in the offshore tax shelter game (Canada is chump-change compared to that).

Lowering the top marginal tax rates also hasn't stopped the uber-wealthy from trying to hide their wealth or lowering their tax hit (upon the sale of a taxable asset) via any no. of tax shelter strategies.

The thing is, these wealthy corporations and individuals have built their wealth on part based on the services provided by the United States (education, infrastructure/transport, military, etc.) but are unwilling to fund them.

3. Stock buybacks help shareholders. Full stop. That is who companies work for.

You're deluded if you think CEOs actually about shareholders (that's like believing that the investment banks actually care about their clients or that Drumpf actually cares about the little guy).

CEOs like to pump up share prices b/c it benefits them (as most of their compensation is tied to stock).

You actually think CEOs care what shareholders say in their annual shareholders meeting?

In addition, not everything shareholders do is good for the company.

For instance, before the Great Recession hit, GM was forced to do 2 share-buy backs by activist shareholders - which severely reduced their cash reserves, something they could have used when the auto market tanked.

Really doesn't matter where you are, but those w/ the gold write the rules.

Doesn't matter what form of govt. or economic system a country has - the wealth gap has been increasing - whether it be the the US, Mexico, the UK, France, Russia, India, South Africa, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, etc.