President Obama spent much of Wednesday huddled with a group of business executives, an effort The New York Times said afterward "went a long way to reset the tone of the relationship between Mr. Obama and corporate America" in the eyes of the corporate chieftains who attended.
That's all well and good, if the problems with today's economy were rooted in a lack of warmth and fuzziness between President Obama and corporate CEOs. But they aren't. For decades, the interests of corporate lobbyists—the people acting on behalf of many of the executives at the White House meeting—have been at odds with the interests of working people. The White House "making peace" with corporate CEOs, to use The Washington Post's description of the meeting, is one thing. But Wall Street needs to make peace with those of us who have been forced, as a result of the conservative policies they promoted, to live through a decade of stagnant wages, unemployment and underemployment. Wall Street needs a reset with working America.
Unfortunately, it's not at all clear that this meeting delivered much for working-class people. The Post reported that "after the meeting, several chief executives said their conversation with the president was constructive and open as they discussed education, trade, taxes and jobs. But the executives and Obama remained vague about specific outcomes they expected from the meeting."
And one of the few specifics reported from the meeting is highly disturbing. Bloomberg reported that the CEOs had their hands out for yet another tax cut:
While Obama has called on the CEOs to spend the $2 trillion in cash their companies have accumulated on job creation, the executives said much of that is earnings from overseas sales that are retained abroad to avoid paying U.S. corporate income tax. U.S.-based multinational corporations pay corporate income tax on earnings when they are brought back to the U.S. If the revenue remains abroad, either in cash or investment in overseas facilities, the money isn’t taxed.
Obama said he would consider the issue and asked what the executives would be willing to give up in other corporate tax rates to make sure it remains revenue neutral.
Actually, in many cases the earnings involved are not necessarily from "overseas sales." Many multinational corporations have created elaborate schemes to ensure that domestic sales are credited as foreign ones in order to avoid paying corporate income tax. It's how Google avoids paying billions in corporate income taxes to the United States and the United Kingdom.
President Obama has rightly pledged to go after this tax dodge and sent some proposals to Congress last year that Citizens for Tax Justice said were "steps in the right direction." Businesses have countered with demands for a "tax holiday," The Financial Times reported in October. Again, at least until now, the Obama administration has resisted. One reason, as the FT notes, is that there is no guarantee that the money coaxed back into the U.S. will actually be used for investment and job creation.
We've been here before. In 2004 the Bush administration and the Republican Congress gave corporations a tax amnesty on profits sheltered overseas. The benefits for workers were negligible. Gannett News Service reported earlier this year in a story about Sen. Barbara Boxer's support for an offshore tax break:
A Congressional Research Service analysis published in January 2009 found that 10 of the top dozen companies that took advantage of the 2004 break cut jobs. Hewlett-Packard repatriated $14.5 billion and laid off 14,500. Pfizer repatriated $37 billion and cut 9,000 jobs in 2005.California-based Oracle and Intel also repatriated foreign earnings. The money helped Oracle acquire two U.S. companies and helped Intel build a new factory
.
The Business Roundtable, a champion of the tax amnesty idea, says of the money that came back to the U.S. as a result of 2004 holiday, 25 percent went to capital investments and 23 percent to hiring and training new workers. Even that positive spin suggests the country doesn't get very much for coaxing businesses to do less than what they should be dong as corporate citizens.
Corporations succeed in the United States not simply because of what they do on their own. Their success depends on the quality of public schools that prepare their workers, transportation networks that move goods and people, agencies that help keep people healthy and safe, and efforts to ensure that each American is able to maintain at least a minimal standard of living. All of these are government functions that corporations undercut when they engage in schemes to avoid paying taxes, leaving the rest of us to struggle with the consequences.
The businesses that profit as a result of the public commons that We the People provide should not have to be given special inducements to pay their fair share toward supporting that commons. (As it stands now, contrary to conservative claims to the contrary, the truth is U.S. corporations pay some of the lowest tax rates of major industrial powers.) That is the starting point from which President Obama should begin in building a new tax framework in which businesses and Main Street can profit together in a new economy.
Even as corporations are seeking a tax holiday, these same corporations spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing congressional candidates opposed to government initiatives that would stimulate the economy and stoke the demand that would coax their hoarded cash off the sidelines. Instead of egging on, tacitly or otherwise, the anti-spending crowd, these CEOs could still choose to back a real economic stimulus—not just cross-your-fingers-and-hope-they-trickle-down tax cuts, but real investment in the economy's future.
Lew Prince, a small business owner in St. Louis, recently penned an op-ed that offered a more Main Street perspective on what businesses need to prosper:
We shouldn’t borrow billions more dollars from China and Saudi Arabia to give to the wealthy. Instead the wealthy should pay their fair share. We need adequate tax revenue to invest in our economy. More tax cuts at the top won’t create jobs. But we will create jobs and strengthen our economy by rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, public transit, levees and water and gas pipelines. We will save and create jobs by investing in education and clean energy research and manufacturing now growing much more rapidly in other countries.
Now that Obama has met with business executives, his next step should be a summit meeting with the unemployed. And then let's have a real debate in which business executives and their conservative benefactors are called to account on whether they are really interested in the fates of American workers or just in their own balance sheets.
Pension funds will be prevented from investing in risky assets, including stocks, by the Pensions Regulator under plans to stop weaker companies with large pension shortfalls from making huge bets.
David Norgrove, chairman of the regulator, will outline his concerns that some schemes are taking risks that could leave a bigger hole in the industry funded Pension Protection Fund in a speech to funds on Tuesday.
“We have to ensure that they are not putting all their money on the 2:30 at Newmarket and if it doesn’t work out, they will fall back on the PPF,” he said. “To some extent, we have seen some behaviour like that.”
Some schemes were so underfunded their only hope of recovery lay in big bets. The regulator was also concerned about standards of governance, particularly for smaller schemes.
“We come across a fair degree of criminality at the smaller end of schemes,” said Mr Norgrove, whose six-year tenure at the regulator, created in 2004, is drawing to an end.
Investment curbs would affect a few weak companies initially but as schemes close to new members and to future accruals trustees will need to insure that the investment strategy takes as few risks as possible. “Eventually it will move up the scale,” he said. Companies will need to be well funded and have few, or no, investment risks.
Under those circumstances, defined benefit schemes might cease to be significant investors in equities and property.
Mr Norgrove said that despite cash injections from employers, defined benefit schemes today are not much better funded. “Contributions have had to run to keep up with rising longevity, falling discount rates and shortfalls in investment returns,” he said. “We clearly can’t have a situation where we move from recovery plan to recovery plan.”
Pensions agency head weighs risk and reward
As David Norgrove, the first chairman of the UK Pension Regulator comes to the end of his term, Britain’s retirement landscape is radically altered from its condition when he first arrived in 2005.
Nearly 60 per cent of defined benefit schemes are closed to new members – up from 44 per cent when he first began counting them in 2006 – and 21 per cent are closed to future benefit accrual, up from 12 per cent at that time. And Britain is about to embark on a universal system of near-compulsory pension provision where every employer will need to offer workers a chance to contribute to a savings pot for retirement where none existed just a few years ago.
Moreover, about 150,000 people had lost all or part of their pension when the legislation that set up the regulator was passed in 2004. Almost none have lost their benefits since.
But some things have not changed, Mr Norgrove notes in remarks prepared for an address to the National Association of Pension Funds on Tuesday.
“Schemes are only marginally better funded then when the scheme specific funding regime was introduced five years ago. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the economic conditions have largely counteracted the gains that schemes had started to make before the downturn,” said Mr Norgrove, who steps down at the end of this month.
Thus, in his parting shot, Mr Norgrove is hinting at the imminent death of one of the sacred cows of defined benefit pensions; that investment in risk assets – equities, property, commodities or hedge funds – can reduce overall risk and make defined benefit retirement promises affordable.
Indeed, he goes so far ... as to say that woefully underfunded schemes of companies with weak balance sheets should have their investments in risky assets limited. Schemes such as these “can only hope to meet their promises by taking very high levels of investment risk with significant potential to go wrong”.
The regulator, he said, must make sure that those deficits get no bigger than they already are. And that means cutting investment risk. But as schemes close to new members, and increasingly, to future accrual by existing members, employers have little vested interest in the welfare of the scheme. Increasingly, he said, these will be run by elderly member-nominated trustees and these, too, will have to curtail investment risk. And trustees will need to be aggressive in pursuing contributions.
Although Mr Norgrove did not say so specifically, the landscape he describes is one where pension fund investment no longer props up stock markets.
In his parting remarks, Mr Norgrove also took aim at two of the most sensitive issues for industry. First, he reiterated the regulator’s view that trustees must carefully monitor offers from employers to scheme members for “enhanced transfer values”, which are very often a bad deal for members. Pensions advisers have been fighting back hard to make it easier for employers to reduce retirement obligations by offering ETVs.
The regulator, he said, believes there are a handful of instances where accepting one might be beneficial – where the member cannot expect to live too long or has no dependents who will benefit from defined benefit pensions, for example. Also, if the offer is significantly superior to insurance cover provided by the PPF, a transfer might make sense.
Second, Mr Norgrove made it clear that defined contribution benefits, which are emerging as the dominant retirement savings scheme, need work. A new consultation on structure will be aired next year, he said.
But for now, he said, the myriad small schemes which dominate DC pension provision are not likely to serve the interests of savers well.
“What we don’t want is another 50,000 DC schemes,” he said. “They don’t have the scale for the governance and they don’t have the scale to keep the charges down.”
Is Mr. Norgrove right to limit risky bets by small underfunded pension
plans? I think so. Taking risky bets to make up for losses might sound
perfectly fine, but it could easily backfire, especially if we head into
a protracted period of debt deflation.
A colleague of mine
remarked that in the last ten years, JGBs outperformed the S&P 500.
And yet 10-years ago everyone was screaming about how low Japanese bond
yields were and many hedge funds were actively shorting JGBs. They all
got slaughtered, and more will get slaughtered shorting Japanese bonds,
even now.
But isn't the Fed giving money away to banks so they
can trade risk assets all around the world? Shouldn't pension funds also
be allowed to take huge bets? That all depends on the internal
expertise of the pension fund managers, on their risk management
process, and most importantly, on their governance.
I'm not
saying to go all in government bonds just in case debt deflation hits,
but it's simply foolhardy to think that investing more in alternatives
will help shore up these pension funds. All this to say that sometimes
it's worth bucking the trend and playing it safe. I know hedge funds,
commodities, real estate and private equity sound sexy, but the truth
is it's a lot sexier to limit your downside risk, especially if you're a
small underfunded pension plan paying out benefits.
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Warren Buffett boosts Iowa wind | Green Tech - CNET <b>News</b>
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Windows Phone Marketplace hits 5000 Apps and is Cracked
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Law enforcement officials says Fox News' report of a probe into a Indiana grandmother for alleged terrorist ties was taken out of context and that the reporter based her report of an investigation off her own tip.
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