About Bonuses....

After a little bit of goading, I finally decided to rise to the bait about making bonus recipients and amounts public for companies that received bailout cash.

Frankly, I started out absolutely bipolar on the subject. One part of me remembers the years at Citibank when, regardless of what I had done for the bank that year, there was no bonus at all. In fact, it seems in retrospect that the more I produced, the less likely I was to get a bonus at all. It occurred to me that I would have been embarrassed to admit that I did NOT get a bonus, never that I had received one. The subject never really came up. We didn't discuss bonuses in those days. However, I also remembered that bonuses in those days were not intended to be part of basic compensation -- as they were for my wife, who worked for an investment banking house, and who always felt that she was under-compensated (probably because of her gender).

The other part of me was filled with righteous populist indignation. I don't need to rehearse all the arguments raised in this camp. They're pretty compelling, too. Furthermore, I'm led to believe that the old scruples about discussing bonus amounts are pretty much gone in most of the financial community.

Finally tipping the balance for me was a post I saw on Facebook, wherein the poster declared that publicizing bonus recipients and amounts would be wrong because it might put spouses and other family members at risk of populist rage. With Lou Dobbs stirring this pot vigorously every evening on CNN, I have to concede that it's possible!

However, where I finally came out on this was here: if a bonus recipient had clearly demonstrated modesty and a great desire for privacy in his/her earlier career (i.e. before 2008), then they ought to be able to continue to have it. On the other hand, those who made no effort to hide the fact that they were obscenely wealthy; in fact, were ostentatiously obscenely wealthy -- have no real claim of a right of privacy now that being ostentatiously obscenely wealthy has lost its cachet.

Did the ostentatiously rich worry that their spouses might be victimized by kidnappers or blackmailers when greed was good? No? Then why should a new-found concern for their spouse trump the public interest today?

Ultimately, we're all accountable for what we've done, even if the wind is coming from another quarter now. It seems to me that it's only fair to let the chips fall where they may.

Quiet on the Dirt Road

We had a beautiful day today. Temperature was in the 50's, sun was shining, no wind to speak of -- a great day to take William the dog for a walk along Between the Lakes Road (the dirt road of this blog title).

We walked from our patch of lakefront along the road to the bridge that separates the two Twin Lakes -- about a mile, I guess. Walking there, we saw no humans whatsoever. No cars, no one working around houses, nobody biking or walking.

We turned around at the bridge and walked back. About half way, we spotted a man jogging in the other direction. William, who is fond of people as well as dogs, stood on his hinder legs as the man approached, said hello, and jogged on. Then William returned to his role of walk companion, followed by a nice long wade in the lake -- the ice is nearly out now.

The remarkable thing was the absence of other people. In a normal year we would have seen construction workers involved in building or renovating along the lake or on one of the roads leading off it. Probably, on a nice day like today, there would have been a few people out just driving around, and, since the road is also a designated hiking trail in our township, probably a few hikers as well. But just the one jogger ... it seemed strange, at least until I contemplated the economic scene.

Even up a dirt road, people are pulling in their horns. The only construction project I'm aware of on our road is our own, wherein we plan to construct a foundation under an end of the house that lacks one. Even the choice of project is indicative of something -- it's not a new coat of paint, or a gazebo, or a deck -- nothing decorative or frivolous or even fun. It's something utterly utilitarian -- a foundation. It holds the house up. It keep the house warmer.

Yet it is also fundamental to future improvements of that end of the structure.

Let's hope there's a metaphor there!