Secondly, I’m now seriously considering getting a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution MR. I don’t care that it’s made in Japan, as long as it goes fast…

So it is no wonder that senior management knows little or nothing about their own businesses and lots about running hedge funds. Management is now a specialty branch of finance. People who know an actual business are seen as specialized machine tools: they are at best a necessary cost that shuld be eliminated as the company pares itself down to the purely financial type of entity its management understands. Ultimately, that entity is a Ponzi scheme, finance at its purest.

I have heard several versions of this story; yours seems the cleanest, most cogent synthesis.

One cause is the way that managers get onto the managerial track these days.

In my first years in the work force, in the large companies that I have worked for, a large proportion of the managers had been promoted from the ranks. At the executive level, they tended to be engineers, chemists, former academics in related disciplines, or particularly successful salesmen. They were mostly within ten years of retirement at the time.

Starting about ten years ago, this changed. Vertical mobility vanished. Middle managers came in with brand new MBAs in Finance and settled in to spend their careers more or less at their entry level. They started green and stayed that way. Executive management came in from an ever smaller circle of executive positions elsewhere in the industry or, increasingly, from financial businesses.

Moreover, a large chunk of any large business is now pure finance, regardless of the nominal industry niche it inhabits. GMAC was a huge chunk of GM’s business. GE Finance is now rivals the jet engine, generator, and appliance branches of the business.

So it is no wonder that senior management knows little or nothing about their own businesses and lots about running hedge funds. Management is now a specialty branch of finance. People who know an actual business are seen as specialized machine tools: they are at best a necessary cost that shuld be eliminated as the company pares itself down to the purely financial type of entity its management understands. Ultimately, that entity is a Ponzi scheme, finance at its purest.

Bob in AZ

Here’s the last sentence of the EFF presser:

The practical effect of today’s order is that important documents shedding light on the telecoms’ push for retroactive immunity will not be available to the public as Congress debates whether to repeal that immunity, at least until January.

My short summary: “Ha Ha! We got a delay to give time for our lackeys in Congress to cover our asses! Hahahahaha!”

Is that about right?

Bob in AZ