Let's just talk this out

I've long been a believer that 'Too Big To Fail' means 'Too Big To Exist', and that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have no benefit for anyone outside of executives and stockholders (the former is entirely 1%ers, and the latter is about 60% 1%ers).

And I knew that this process of consolidation was also leading the government to send big subsidies the way of those companies.  And I'd recently learned that those subsidies were basically the entirety of the profits of the banking industry.

But it was still a bit of a surprise to find out that the FDIC had been quietly settling fraud cases with minimal settlements for a number of years.

Yeah, that'll get them to stop.  Sure it will.  As will Holder's recent admission that he is unable to prosecute these people.  Uh huh.  I'm just going to hold my breath until that works.

...

We're all pod people

I laugh when I see someone call people buying Apple products "pod people", the implication being that Apple's products are either inferior or overpriced. And yes, I've still seen that happen at least once recently.

So it is with some amusement that I note that Apple's latest quarter saw them break all sorts of records. Not only did they blow away every financial record for the company, but they had the second-most profitable quarter for any company. Ever. (At least, if you don't measure in inflation-adjusted dollars. I do wonder about some of the older companys, like Standard Oil, back in the day. I have to think that some of their records would be awfully hard to beat, but I'm just guessing about that.)

They somehow managed to have more profit than Google did revenue ($13.6B v $10.6B. Thanks. That just blows my mind. And look at their cash on hand.

I guess there's a lot of pod people out there.

Anyway, I hope Apple keeps innovating, instead of litigating, and keeps making such cool products.

Yet another sign of economy severely out of whack

When I saw the headline, my first thought was that these results must have been driven by Newt Gingrich and his wife finally paying off their credit card debt with Tiffany's. But a quick perusal of the actual article shows numbers much too large for that to have had any effect.

But a second thought is that this shows how the recession (this never did get quite big enough to technically be a depression, right?) has yet to affect the rich to any appreciable degree. Which makes their whining and moaning about bonus limits (which were only for a quarter, right?) even more ludicrous than they already were.

One could even start building a case that this is indicative that those limits should have been continued for quite a while. And that the whole financial crisis was used with impressive opportunism to shift money from the poor to the rich (no, I'm not espousing some conspiracy theory that that was the goal, but it was certainly a result).

And that's just sad. We should not be allowing wealth to become so concentrated; it just isn't good for anyone (not even for the rich, even if they won't look far enough head to see that).