I simply concurred with Radley’s original post, after reading all of the comments. I find your reaction to that a bit extreme.

If you don’t agree, the appropriate course is to present a counter-argument to Radley’s, which you have yet to do.

You’re a suck-ass. I can’t stand a brown-noser. I hope that you lose all of your money in the stock market and have to eat discarded McDonald’s waste while sitting on the curb on Wall Street with Grasso next to you.

After reading all of the comments above, I have to conclude that none of them change the substance of your original post.

Once again, you win, as you should!

Yes, there are other exchanges but how easy is it for a company listed on the NYSE to move their stock to another exchanged? The NYSE has built up an entire onerous mountain of regulations and barriers, which is one reason why very few companies actually move. This isn’t capitalism, at least, not in my book.

If I had my way, I would fire the entire Board. They overpaid Grasso in the first place. Many of the Directors didn’t even know what they were signing off on (or so they say). And finally, to save their fixed, inefficient system of “specialists” from the harsh glare of publicity, they’ve offered Grasso as a sacrifical lamb?

Gimme a break :-)

Taxes are a involuntary game, the NYSE is not. If we didn’t buy a million jersey’s, a trillion tickets, and a gajillion hot dogs, Giambi wouldn’t make $20 million a year(I don’t know, I just made that up). This is not a monopolistic industry, this isn’t a utility company.

For instance, if another postal company came out and said “we’ll give you $10,000 when you are 65 and the current will only give you $5,000 if you buy 10 stamps a week for the rest of your life”-what are you gonna do?

You can easily get into just NASDAQ or AMEX or any of the other smaller exchanges, just talk to your broker or mutual fund manager and he’ll get you into a fund. People don’t do that because the NYSE makes you money, and that’s what we’re all in it for. If Casso’s salary caused the NYSE to lose market value, his loyalty would shine through. And until that happens, he should not be fired.

If what you say about city and state government subsidies to the NYSE is true (assuming you and I have the same definition of “subsidy”), then your point is well taken.

Scared Stiff –

You miss my point. Of course it wouldn’t be smart to save for retirement using nothing but CD’s, particularly if you’re young. But choosing the better alternative of investing in the stock market does not mean that because it’s the financially smarter choice, the costs a stock exchange charges you for use of their facility somehow becomes a “tax”. It’s still a choice. Stock exchanges don’t have guns and jails. There are no choices with taxes.

Given that corporate America has shirked what was once considered its responsibility, the only realistic hope the average American has of retirement lies in the stock market.

“Grasso’s pay is not the same thing as a tax.”

The NYSE has, I believe, received a billion or more in subsidies from NYC, possibly from the state of New York as well. Those would be taxpayer dollars. It’s not unreasonable to assume that those taxpayer dollars essentially underwrote Grasso’s pay package, and may have provided some kind of justification or incentive for the vast pay increase: “Hey, we got a billion dollars free from the mayor. How about I get $140 million of it?”

As to the specialist rant above… there are ways around it. When my dad was a partner in a small firm back in the 80s, they used to route their trades electronically through the Cincinnati Stock Exchange. Nowadays, you would probably prefer to use an ECN like Instinet to do the same thing. The idea is that just because the NYSE lists a stock, that doesn’t mean you have to buy it through them.

The specialists are what makes the NYSE what it is, they are what makes it an exchange. They are a tradition and a valuable asset for many. However, you aren’t forced to use them.

The bit in my post about 1 in 8 living in poverty and “cackling in his leather chair as he coints his gold” is not from me but from Gregg Easterbrook (who I mistakenly called Frank – his brother and a 7th Circuit judge, sorry about that). I prefaced it by warning that it is overstated, but I think he makes some good points.

And even if your mutual fund doesn’t invest in the stock market, theoretically the corporations pass on their stock listing fees in the form of higher prices that we all pay.

I recognize that the passed-on costs argument is somewhat absurd, in that the costs would be almost invisibly small, but isn’t it true on its face?

Grasso’s pay is not the same thing as a tax. (I’m assuming, as Radley mentions above, that the NYSE is not protected from risk by the gub’mint — if it is, that’s a whole different story).

If you don’t pay taxes, you’re not paying the government. The govnerment has guns and jails. You simply can’t opt out of taxes without losing your freedom.

On the other hand, you CAN opt out of using the NYSE. Use NASDAQ or AMEX…nobody’ll send you to jail for doing so. This distinction is not just semantics. The difference is critical…capitalism is voluntary by it’s nature.

Your example of retirement plans can also be explained away. You don’t have to save for retirement using your employer’s 401(k) plan…set up an IRA or even a taxable account, using nothing but NASDAQ securities, CD’s or commercial paper, for example. Hell, just stuff you cash in the matress. Just because it would be PRUDENT to invest in NYSE securities via your funds in your qualified plan doesn’t mean the embedded cost of doing so (i.e., Grasso’s salary) is a “tax”.

Based on your logic, I’m taxed on Post’s CEO salary every time I buy a box of Raisin Bran. Yes, I bear the embedded cost when I make the purchase…but I don’t have to make the purchase.

Tell that to your retirement plan’s mutual fund manager. A lot of people don’t have that kind of control; many retirement plans limit you to choosing among a growth fund, a bond funds, etc.

Supposedly, the pay deal was obfuscated among a bunch of lengthy documents (or something like that).

If true, the board didn’t see the $140 million+ figure and sign off on it; instead, the scope of the entire compensation would have been concealed through complexity.

I suppose this was to get the pay package past the directors who weren’t sycophants who would have signed off had the total been stated up front.

Hmm. I’ll have to look a little into what you’ve written. I’ll plead a bit of ignorance here, as SEC ins and outs bore me to death. But if it’s true that NYSE is essentially protected by the federal government from risk, then I’d concede you have a point.

Much of the rest of your post is a little histrionic. One in eight Americans lives in poverty? Please. Our poor are upper middle class most anywhere else in the world. And Grasso is “cackling in his leather chair as he coints his gold?” Come on.

Also not buying that we pay for Grasso’s salary out of our own pockets. You don’t have to invest in stock, do you? And you don’t have to invest in NYSE-traded stocks, either. There are other exchanges.

As for “presiding over corporate fraud,” can you really blame Grasso for Ken Lay? Is he supposed to know the internal goings-on of every firm in the country? Let’s be clear — the corporate scandals involved a handful of firms, out of tens of thousands. It’s silly to think that the man who merely presides over the place where those firms’ stocks are traded should have headed off corruption in every firm in the country.

And yes, I do think bringing the NYSE back online two days after 9/11 was a pretty remarkable accomplishment.

Bob –

Cheney could be getting $1 billion per year from Halliburton, for all I care. The problem arrises when Halliburton regularly does business with the federal government, where Cheney is currently #2 in command (or #1, depending on who you believe), and happens to be getting more than $2 billion in non-competitive contracts to rebuild a country we bombed, under questionable circumstances, at Cheney’s urging.