O'Neil Perspective

Much of the country is angry about multimillion dollar bonuses paid out to senior executives at Wall Street firms that accepted bailout funds from the federal government.

This is part of a broader discontentment about the extent to which the federal response to a very real financial crisis has been structured to benefit Wall Street more than Main Street. Many people believed government officials when they said that government support was necessary to save the financial system. But when aided firms turned around and passed out massive "business as usual" bonuses to senior executives of those firms, the public rightly smelled a rat.

For the rest of the article, or to comment:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-o/wall-street-bonuses-and-t_b_437562.html

 

Michael J. O'Neil PhD

Martha Coakley may have run a poor campaign, but she was also saddled with having to defend a healthcare plan that is poorly understood by the public and whose adherents have failed to effectively articulate its core aspects and benefits.

For the remainder of the article, click HERE to go to the full article on the  HuffingtonPost.  Please enter your comments there!

FYI: to see the referenced television clip, click HERE.

 

Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

I wrote a letter to an old friend from Crabapple Cove, Maine.

To see the relevance of this to the raging discussion of The Public Option,  click:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-o/the-public-option_b_343724.html

and feel free to add your comments!

 

Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

A beer summit won't solve this one.

The Arizona Legislature has been at an impasse over the budget for months. The debate is not over minutiae: Most Democratic legislators have fundamentally different and incompatible views of the role of government from most Republican legislators.

The consensus among the Republican majority is that state government is too big. Its solution is to "starve the beast." The Democratic position is that any fat that was once in state government has long since been excised and that further cuts will severely curtail vital services.

For the remainder of this Perspective piece published in Sunday's Arizona Republic, click this link:

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/2009/08/08/20090808oneil09.html

 

Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

I was thrilled to see the President invite Sgt. Crowley and Professor Gates to the White House for a beer.

While this conclave of three Alpha Males could become the temporary testosterone capital of the world, I have genuine optimism for what may transpire. The more I consider who all three of these men are, the more they strike me as big, principled men. The respective careers strongly suggest that each will really wish to do the right thing.

To see the rest, click on the link below to the Huffington Post article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-o/what-i-hope-a-fly-on-the_b_245063.html

 

Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

How you react to the case of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley may tell you more about yourself than about the incident itself.

(click to go to the entire article published in today's HuffingtonPost):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-o/the-gatescrowley-rorschac_b_244109.html


....and please Comment!
 
 
Michael J. O'Neil PhD

What does the testimony of a Presidential nominee to a nonpolitical federal statistical agency tell you about the strategic approach of the Obama administration? If you observe how it fits a pattern, it tells you quite a bit.

Click here for the remainder of the article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-o/census-pick-illustrates-b_b_215847.html

 

Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

A personal insight from almost thirty years ago sheds light on a Supreme Court nominee's qualifications. . .

Many years ago, I was elected foreman of a jury in a civil case. My experience taught me the greater collective wisdom we get when diverse perspectives are brought to bear on a legal judgment. I was, at the time, a professor in my late twenties. The jury was a diverse lot. There was one particular moment in the course of jury deliberation...
(click to go to the entire article published in today's HuffingtonPost):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-o/diversity-perspective-and_b_213085.html

....and please Comment!
 
 
Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

I was a guest on the McMahon Group last week on KTAR.  Pat always provokes an interesting discussion.  If you'd like to hear it, click here.

 

Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

My take on the first hundred days of the Obama Presidency, as broadcast this morning on ABC15 TV.

Click here to view.

 

Cheers,

Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

(Published in the Phoenix Business Journal - March 27th, 2009)

Everyone, it seems, is furious about the AIG bonuses.  Almost everyone (myself included) shared the same initial reaction: HOW DARE THEY take millions in bonuses out of the billions in public funds they received!    Especially because it was the risky calls they made that produced the need for public funds--calls that resulted in billions of dollars of losses.  IT IS OUR MONEY!
 
But Anger is usually a lousy basis for sound public policy.  Politicians are jumping over one another to try to figure out how to tax back every penny the greedy bastards stole from the public, full well knowing that there is a better than even chance of the courts striking such laws down as unconstitutional. (If you don’t understand why, go to Wikipedia and search for either “ex post facto” or “bill of attainer”).  Since the politicians are aware of this, their actions are more designed to show action than to effect it.
 
More importantly, anger-based policy actions almost always neglect larger, more structural, problems.  The issues involved are much larger than AIG specifically, or even bailed-out companies.  The entire basis of compensation in much of the upper reaches of the corporate world has come to bear little relation to any known reality.  It was not always the case, but corporate C-level compensation in America has grown to be out of line with the rest of the world and it is largely out of the reach of even company stockholders. The financial world is a case in point, but only a manifestation of a larger trend.
 
AIG employees who traded in credit default obligations (CDOs) and similar products dealt in very large denominations. Huge sums were made by AIG, and the traders were paid commissions on these profits.  And no one objected, since these geniuses were making much larger sums for AIG.
 
That worked until sometime in 2007 when the underlying structure of the market went to hell. Now the same geniuses who had made billions for AIG were losing billions for the company.  How could these geniuses turn into morons so quickly?
 
Of course, they were never that smart, nor that dumb.  Almost anyone with a modicum of numerical competence could have made fortunes doing what they were doing through 2006 and the early months of 2007.  And, if they stayed in the same business, even the best and the brightest of them could not have prevented massive losses from sometime in 2007 forward.
 
And insiders were savvy enough to recognize this.  They got AIG to guarantee them the same level of bonuses in 2008 and 2009 that they had received in 2007.  Everyone knew the bottom was falling out of the business. So they covered themselves.
 
But part of the explanation for the attitudes of those involved may be found in human nature. When things go well, we all tend to attribute it to our intelligence and hard work.  When they go badly, we all blame bad luck or forces beyond our control. These traders were no different.
 
If we focus only on getting the ill-begotten bonuses back, we miss the larger point: the compensation systems were irrational from the beginning. Traders were compensated for the sums they “made” for AIG, but not penalized for the long-term risk they also created in the process. And there is a point in all of this about corporate compensation systems generally. Look no further than the auto industry: for decades these behemoths were run by their own brand of geniuses who never did anything other than what had been done before. And they all figured they were pretty smart-and deserving of stratospheric compensation.  But because their genius lay only in doing what had worked for decades, when the world changed, they were the worst possible people to lead their companies into a changed future.
 
And we should not lose sight of the fact that the bonuses involved comprise less than one-tenth of one percent of the sum the federal government has plowed into AIG.  Where is the outcry about the other 99.9+%?
 
 
Michael J. O'Neil is President of O'Neil Associates, a national public opinion and market research firm based in Tempe, Arizona.  O'Neil Associates has conducted more than 1,700 opinion research surveys in the last 30+ years. This  experience has given him ample opportunity to observe that the big guys are not always the smartest. A sociologist by training, he has taught at several universities including the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and Northwestern.  He is reachable at oneil@oneilresearch.com or www.oneilresearch.com..

 

Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

And there is a point beneath the levity.  Invest half a minute to see what it is.  Click here to see it.

 

Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

I had some comments on the Arizona budget crisis and choices faced by the new Governor, Jan Brewer.  These were broadcast on KNXV/ABC 15 TV yesterday.  Click here to take a peek.

 

Michael J. O'Neil, PhD

The significance of the Barack Obama’s election hit me especially hard when the results came in from Virginia.  While the Presidential outcome was already evident to me by that time, there was something about the Virginia results that jarred me.  (More)

This past Sunday, I participated in Sunday Squareoff   (NBC, TV 12) with John Kavanagh (chair, House Appropriations Committee) and David Lujan (House Democratic Leader) in a discussion of the Arizona budget. The differences in the positions of these two leaders are striking and clearly reflect the varying perspectives of their respective parties.  Kavanagh (and most Republicans) wishes to cut whatever amount of spending is required to avoid any tax increase, while Lujan (and most Democrats) focus on preserving programs they regard as essential. 
 (More)

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• Wall Street Bonuses and Tax Equity: A Modest Proposal for the State of the Union
• Health Care Reform: Losing the Message War
• The Public Option
• How Much Government Do We Want?
• What I Hope a Fly on the Wall in the White House Would Hear
• The Gates/Crowley Rorschach Test
• Census Pick Illustrates Broader Obama Strategy
• Diversity, Perspective, and the Supreme Court
• McMahon Group Sunday May 10, 2009
• Obama's 100 Day Report Card

• General [36]

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