Seeger wrote this song, famously adapted by The Byrds, from a poem in the Book of Ecclesiastes that loved so much, he carried a copy around in his pocket for months before inspiration hit and he set it to music. There is a time to buy and a time to sell. You can hear Pete singing it here.<\/strong><\/a><\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0AT&T as a dividend play?<\/strong><\/span> T is yielding 5.5%. But it’s done that without significantly raising its dividend (except from 45 to 46 cents in the latest quarter). Its higher dividend yield is due to a cratering stock price, as a result of Wall Street’s concern with the huge new competition in the cell phone biz — especially from T-Mobile and Sprint.<\/p>\n What’s amazing about AT&T is its incredibly awful management. The company is in the hottest industry around — cell phones — and its revenues and earnings have not<\/strong> grown in five years. In fact gross income in 2012 was actually less than in 2008 — a remarkable accomplishment. And it seems the only reason earnings have held up at all — is that each year AT&T has amortized its intangibles less and less — a slight of accounting. Check out this chart from the Wall Street Journal. It’s fascinating.<\/p>\n I thought the idea of buying AT&T for yield for IRA accounts was great. Now I’m thinking the stock is a good short. At last count P\/E is a whopping 23.<\/p>\n Jamie Dimon gets a raise.<\/strong><\/span> And Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone is justifiably upset. Here’s the beginning of his article:<\/p>\n \u00a0 If you make a big show of punishing someone, and when you’re done they still don’t think they have a behavior problem, you probably picked the wrong punishment. Every parent on earth knows this implicitly – but does the Obama White House finally get it, too, now, after Jamie Dimon’s raise?<\/p>\n When the board of JP Morgan Chase gave its blowdried, tirelessly self-regarding CEO a whopping 74 percent raise – after a year in which the Justice Department blasted the bank with $20 billion in sanctions – it was one of those rare instances where Main Street and Wall Street were mostly in agreement.<\/p>\n Everyone from the Financial Times to Forbes.com to the Huffington Post decried the move. The Wall Street pundits mostly thought it was a dumb play by the Chase board from a self-interest perspective, one guaranteed to inspire further investigations by the government. Meanwhile, the non-financial press generally denounced the raise as a moral obscenity, yet another example of the serial coddling of Wall Street’s habitually overcompensated executive class.<\/p>\n Both groups were right. But to me the biggest news was how brutal an indictment Jamie’s raise was of the Obama\/Holder Justice Department, which continues to profoundly misunderstand the mindset of the finance villains they claim to be regulating.<\/p>\n Chase’s responses to Holder’s record penalties have been hilarious. Their first move was to make sure people outside the penthouse boardroom took on all the pain, laying off 7,500 employees and freezing salaries for the non-CEO class of line employees.<\/p>\n Next, Chase’s board members sat down, put their misshapen heads together, considered the impact of this disastrous year of settlements, and decided to respond by more than doubling the take-home pay of the executive in charge, giving Dimon about $20 million in salary and equity.<\/p>\n In the end, the fines left the decision-making class of the company not just uninjured but triumphant. Dimon’s raise was symbolic of a company-wide boost in compensation following the mass layoffs, as average per-employee expenses rose four percent overall, to $122,653, despite the $20 billion burden imposed upon the firm by the state.<\/p>\n There were a variety of reasons for the board’s decisions, but one of the big ones, according to various reports, was that bank honchos wanted to send a message to the government that it believed the company had been unfairly treated. This was a notion Dimon himself snootily trumpeted just before his raise was announced.<\/p>\n You can read the rest of his article — which is called “Jamie Dimon’s Raise Proves U.S. Regulatory Strategy is a Joke” — here. <\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n I’m a JPMorgan Chase client. This stuff bothers me.<\/p>\n <\/strong>I am suddenly inundated with spam.<\/strong> <\/span>Everything from reviewing my credit update, to pills for my sex life, to cream to drop 20 years off my aging face, to free gift cards from every retailer and their uncle, to help with my student loan that I never had, to deals on cars I don’t want, to DIY floor coating, to training to be a nurse, to my favorite:<\/p>\n Eviction notice,<\/strong> Please find the lawsuit details attached to this letter.<\/p>\n If you do not move within this period of time, we will have no other alternative than to have you physically removed from the property per order of the Judge.<\/p>\n If we can be of any assistance to you during your relocation, please feel free to contact us any time.<\/p>\n Court representative, If I had opened the attached Eviction Notice, I’d load my PC with serious viruses.<\/p>\n Norton gets rid of some of my spam. I’ve written some rules in Outlook to delete more of it. But the stuff is getting so creative these days — they keep changing whom it’s from and its title — I have to spend too much time deleting them manually. Yuch.<\/p>\n Key<\/strong>: Get yourself an email address from Gmail, which you use only<\/strong> for online shopping and which you deliberately kill every six months.<\/p>\n This is a MR-16 lightbulb. It’s junk.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n It sits in track lights. The bulb blows constantly. The fixtures are garbage. And I’m sick of buying new ones to replace the old busted ones. I have fixtures from Lightolier and Lighting Services. Both are junk.<\/p>\n Favorite recent New Yorker cartoons.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n![\"PeteSeeger\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/PeteSeeger.jpg\")
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\nHereby you are notified that you have to move to another location from the currently occupied premises within the next three weeks.<\/p>\n
\nSandra Mason<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n