How to Get Started with Linkedin

by Jake Swearingen
http://www.bnet.com/2403-13070_23-219860.html

More and more business professionals are using social networks to build relationships, meet new contacts, and market themselves. For the uninitiated, however, diving into the virtual meet-and-greet can be daunting. Where to begin? For first-time users, the answer is LinkedIn. Developed specifically for business, the site doesn’t run the risk of blurring your professional life with your private one; and with more than 25 million users, it serves virtually every industry and profession.

Joining a network like LinkedIn is simple, but turning it into a powerful networking tool takes a bit of savvy. Here's how to set up a profile, build a network, and put it all to work — without social-networking anxiety.

Create a Compelling Profile
Goal: Make it clear what you’ve done in your career — and what you want to do.
Before you connect to others, you must first set up a profile page at http://www.linkedin.com/. While your page will detail your work history, don’t assume you can copy and paste your resume and be done with it. Your profile page should reflect your professional interests, passions, and ambitions. The site will walk you through filling in the blanks, but you’ll want to think ahead about two areas:

Defining Yourself
Directly underneath your name will be a short headline of four or five words. More than anything else in your profile, these words are how people find and define you. Are you seeking to connect mainly with others in your field and industry? Then a simple, explanatory headline like “Senior Project Manager at McDonnell-Douglas” is best. Are you seeking to branch out into other areas? “Leader of High-Performing Aeronautical Engineering Projects” alerts others quickly to the value you would bring to an organization. Regardless of how you phrase your headline, make sure to use keywords that will help others find you.

What You’ve Done, and What You Want to Do
When listing your past job experiences, use verbs as much as possible. Show what you’re passionate about, and what you’ve learned from each job. Chris Brogan, a vice president at business-technology company CrossTech Media and a frequent blogger on the topic of social networks, suggests listing “non-jobs” you’ve done, like chairing a conference or leading a panel. “People shouldn’t just think of this as a resume tool,” he says. “It can be a way to show color and breadth.”

“LinkedIn is aspirational,” says Mrinal Desai, a former LinkedIn “evangelist” and currently a vice president at desktop-sharing software company CrossLoop, Inc. He recommends including not just what you’ve done but what you want to do in the future. One place to do this is in the “About” section. “You can add an area where maybe you don’t have experience but you’re looking to gain it,” Desai says.

Checklist
Make Sure You Include:
1. A solid headline with keywords relevant to your industry.
2. A picture. “People do business with people,” Desai says.
3. How you prefer to be contacted. At the bottom of your profile, you can let people know how you want to be contacted — through LinkedIn, by e-mail, or over the phone.
4. What you want to be contacted about. At the bottom of your profile, you can select interests like reference requests, consulting offers, or career opportunities.
Make Sure You Don’t Include:
1. Any contact information you’re not comfortable having your contacts see. Your contact information will be visible only to those you are connected to, but you should decide whether you want that to include things like phone numbers or personal e-mail.
2. Anything that even begins to stray from the truth. Unlike even a resume, your profile will be seen by a lot of eyes. Did you really lead that project, or did you lead it along with several others?
3. Anything you wouldn’t want fellow colleagues — current, former, or future — to know. LinkedIn is for professional relationships, and just like at the dinner table, it’s wise to keep politics and religion politely to yourself.

Build Your Network
Goal: Connect with others who share your professional interests and can help you meet your goals.
After you’ve created your profile, it’s time to begin to connect to others. LinkedIn will allow you to search for people you know to see if they’re already members. But once you connect to someone, you can also look at the profiles of anyone they know, and in turn anyone those people know. Because of these three degrees of separation, your network can grow exponentially. Fewer than fifty direct contacts can translate to millions of business users.

Before you begin connecting, decide who you want to connect to. LinkedIn suggests in its FAQ, “Only invite those you know and trust.” As Anshu Sharma, a senior director at Force.com, put it in his blog, “If you receive an invite on LinkedIn, ask yourself if you would take a call from this person on a busy Monday morning.”

Desai sees who you connect to as a way to ensure quality control: “My network acts as a filter, and I act as a filter for my network. My network won’t send me anything that’s spam.”
Also consider your position relative to those you’re connecting to. “Does my CEO ‘friend’ our receptionist? Does he ‘friend’ his niece?” Brogan asks. “I think it depends on how much status matters for you.” A good rule of thumb is the more traditional your industry, the less you want to connect to those very far above or below you on the corporate ladder.

But what if you work at Hewlett-Packard? Should you connect with someone at rival company IBM? Yes, says Brogan: “More than likely, you’re not always going to be at the same company, and there could also be some cross-pollination of ideas there.”

Nitty Gritty

How to Not Be Friends
If someone contacts you and you don’t want to form a connection with them, you don’t need to flatly reject them and worry about the attendant awkwardness. When looking at the invitation to connect, simply hit “Archive.” The other person does not receive a message saying their invitation has been rejected, and you don’t have to worry about unwanted invitations clogging up your inbox.
Likewise, if you find that an existing contact is blasting you with too much information or making overly aggressive requests for introductions and recommendations, LinkedIn will let you remove that person easily — and without the contact knowing they’re out of your network. If only it were that easy in real life.

Get the Most From Your Connections
Goal: Now that you’re connected, put all those people to use.
There are three main things your network can do for you: answer business-related questions, make recommendations and introductions, and provide company information. Make sure that you focus on helping others when you first join. “It’s the idea of bringing wine to the party,” Brogan says. “If you’re offering up helpful stuff and services, your reputation will go a lot further than if you’re just out there for yourself.”

1. Ask and answer questions.
While signed in, you can quickly see a list of open questions that have been asked by anyone in your extended network. Queries can range from advice on turning a website into a business to detailed questions about tax law. Participating in these exchanges is an easy way of gaining trust and building your reputation. Asking questions will prompt informed sources to offer their expert advice (which helps everyone in the network), while providing answers gives you a chance to show off your own expertise to others.

2. Recommend and introduce colleagues.
Recommendations work as a form of currency in a social network. Those who are happy with your work can write a brief description of their experience on your LinkedIn profile. By having a broad range of endorsements attesting to your professional expertise, you show others that you can be trusted. And make sure to recommend those you’ve had good experiences with.

Introductions are trickier but also more valuable. This is where your personal judgment needs to come into play. When someone contacts you for an introduction, be sure you understand and approve of what they want before making the handoff. Likewise, make your intentions clear when you are asking for an introduction.

3. Learn more about your professional network.
You can quickly learn a lot about a potential business partner or contact by reading their profile. Mrinal Desai uses it before almost every meeting. “It brings up a lot of things you can discuss and build a relationship on,” he says. Unlike, for example, someone’s Google results, everything you find on LinkedIn has been voluntarily placed there by your contact.
Rachna D. Jain, a psychologist and chief social marketer at MindShare Corp., a company focusing on the psychology of social networking, recommends watching to see who your contacts are becoming connected with to figure out who might be worth getting to know yourself.

Hot Tip

Staying Plugged In
LinkedIn has a number of plug-ins and add-ons that can make your social networking even more effective. Here are three you should make a part of your online life:

LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar: Build your network from those you e-mail frequently, manage your network from within Outlook, and see mini LinkedIn profiles for everyone who e-mails you.

Web Browser Toolbar (for Internet Explorer and Firefox): Quickly search LinkedIn for any name you come across while surfing. Read about an interesting person in the Journal? Click on their name and see how closely you’re connected.

LinkedIn E-mail Signature: Create a custom e-mail signature in Outlook, Outlook Express, and Mozilla Thunderbird with a brief version of your LinkedIn profile and a link to your full profile.

Manage Your Social Network
Goal: Continue to gain benefits from your social network — without making it your full-time job.
“Don’t expect that you can post something one time and get ongoing benefits,” Jain says. You’ll need to continually update and refine your profile and your network. The most obvious way to do this is to add new contacts. When Jain comes home from a conference, for example, she goes through the business cards she collected to see who’s on LinkedIn. Adding new contacts, sometimes from outside your immediate field or industry, is also a subtly persuasive way to sell yourself by letting others see how far your professional sphere extends.

Brogan advises checking up on your profile about once a month and making sure your job description is still accurate. He also recommends reaching out to contacts even when you don’t have a business concern. He tries to touch base with a few contacts every week for no other reason than to check in and see how things are going. “The thing I think people do a little wrong in social networking is they reach out only when they have an issue — when they’ve lost their job, or they need you out of the blue.”

Danger! Danger! Danger!

Five things you should never do on a social network, according to Dr. Rachna D. Jain:
1. Leave negative feedback. “It stays around for a very long time, so even if you have a change of heart, it can be very difficult to retract it.”
2. Lie. “Give a truthful account of where you’ve worked and what you’ve done. Be real. Be honest.”
3. Spam. “It’s not a push marketing strategy. Avoid drowning others in your promotional material.”
4. Gossip. “Don’t send forth news that may not be yours to share.”
5. Oversell yourself. “Stay away from arrogance or over-hyping what you do.”

U.S. Jobs Data Likely Less Bleak in April

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. non-farm payrolls data on Friday will likely show the pace of lay-offs eased in April, potentially adding fuel to a two-month stock market rally even though the jobless rate looks set to hit a 25-year high.

A Reuters survey earlier this week forecast employers cut 620,000 jobs last month after slashing 663,000 in March. Economists expect the April unemployment rate to surge to 8.9 percent from 8.5 percent a month earlier.

than forecast after another independent survey, by ADP Employer Services, released on Wednesday showed private sector employers eliminated 491,000 positions in April, the smallest amount since last November, after cutting 708,000 jobs in March.

Slower job losses would add to signs that the intensity of the U.S. recession, now in its 17 month, is ebbing. The market will also watch for revisions to March and February figures.
An easing in weekly unemployment data and new benefit claims suggest job losses likely lessened a bit last month.

The most optimistic forecast in the Reuters poll of 70 economists is for non-farm payrolls to drop by 530,000 jobs and the unemployment rate to climb to rise by just two-tenths of a percentage point to 8.7 percent.

That kind of scenario would provide "one more strong green shoot to the bullish case on the economy," said David Dietze, chief investment strategist at Point View Financial Services in Summit, New Jersey.

The stock market has rallied on the assumption that the worst of the economic crisis is over, with leading stock indexes up 35 percent since early March.

If both the headline non-farm payrolls number and the unemployment rate are within market expectations, the stocks rally could get fresh life, with cyclical stocks such as equipment manufacturers and industrials the most likely to rise.

The dollar could fall a bit as investors shift into currencies seen as riskier, such as the euro, the British pound and the Australian dollar.

"Risk appetite has come back with a vengeance. If the number is in line with expectations, it will be mildly dollar negative in the sense that risk appetite will continue to lift the high-yielding currencies," said Boris Schlossberg, director of FX Research at GFT Forex in New York.
Conversely, a figure that is much worse than the consensus estimate could provide the spark for a sell-off in stocks and stronger demands for U.S. debt, pushing up the dollar.

The most pessimistic forecast in the Reuters survey is for payrolls to contract by 810,000.
Building, construction, retail and bank shares would fare worst in that kind of scenario, analysts said.

"There will be concern on the part of Wall Street that maybe we can't be sure that the recession is ending as quickly as the bullish case scenario," said Dietze.

If you're pissed about the AIG crooks, read this!!

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/03/guest-post-what-do-pensions-have-in.html

What Do Pensions Have in Common with AIG?
Submitted by Leo Kolivakis, publisher of Pension Pulse


After rallying for four days, stocks gave up early gains and the rally fizzled this afternoon:

Analysts said Monday's pullback after a four-session surge didn't necessarily signal that traders were reconsidering their newfound optimism about financial stocks, a main driver behind last week's advance.

In fact some viewed the measured easing in stocks as reassuring following a surge of more than 9 percent in major indicators last week, more than the market has moved in some years.

"This is healthy," said Dave Rovelli, managing director of trading at brokerage Canaccord Adams in New York. "The best thing for this market is that we don't go up aggressively. A steady rise of a few up days then a down day would be a lot better than 1,000 points up."

Stocks rose for much of the session as investors snapped up hard-hit financial shares. Comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and reassuring news from a British bank eased some worries about the overall economy and prospects for financial companies struggling with bad debt.

Bernanke said Sunday the recession would probably end this year if the government's efforts to revive the banking industry succeed. In an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," Bernanke said fixing the economy will require getting banks to lend more freely and financial markets to work more normally again.

Financials rallied strongly with AIG (AIG) and Citigroup (C) leading the pack, up 66% and 30% respectively today. And this constitutes a "healthy" market?!?

Hedge funds have been playing the financials using the Direxion Financial Bull 3X shares (FAS), an ETF that seeks to replicate, net of expenses, 300% of the daily performance of the Russell 1000 Financial Services Index. Who said the addiction to leverage is dead?

The big scandal today revolved around the AIG bonuses. By now, everyone knows that Goldman Sachs won big on the AIG bailout. And Goldman was not alone. AIG also paid hedge funds and other banks with taxpayer money:

While the biggest global banks and municipalities topped the list of entities that AIG owed money under counterparty agreements, two hedge fund firms, Citadel Investment Group and Paloma Securities, were also on the list for $200 million apiece. The two firms were owed the money under securities lending agreements with AIG.

A spokeswoman for Citadel said the firm had no comment. A spokesman for Paloma said the payment was part of a securities loan transaction for corporate bonds that was done in the usual course of business.

Indeed, the $200 million to the hedge fund firms was small feed compared to the money that the world’s biggest banks got for different kinds of counterparty agreements.

Goldman Sachs was listed as receiving $12.9 billion, Merrill Lynch got $6.8 billion, Bank of America received $5.2 billion, Citigroup received $2.3 billion and Wachovia $1.5 billion.

Foreign banks who received AIG money included Societe Generale ($11.9 billion), Deutsche Bank ($11.8 billion), Barclays ($8.5 billion) and UBS ($5 billion).

AIG came out with the list in an effort to head off the protest over the news that the company was paying bonuses of up to $165 million for executives in their structured finance group. That was the business that went heavily into collateralized debt obligations and got AIG into its financial mess to begin with.

AIG protested that it had to pay the bonuses because it was under contract to do so. The company also claimed that it had to pay the bonuses to retain those traders in order to unwind the business.

On Monday, President Barack Obama said he was asking U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to find every legal way to block the payments. “Under these circumstances it’s hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay,” Obama said. “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?”

The U.S. Treasury has loaned AIG almost $170 billion in financial bailout money and now owns about 80% of the company.

The pressure mounted on AIG on Monday when New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sent a letter to AIG Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy about the traders’ bonuses, demanding details about their names, job description and job performance and whether the payments had already been made.

Cuomo said in his letter that if the company did not comply with his request by 4 p.m. (EDT) Monday, his office would issue subpoenas and go to court.

AIG did not immediately return a phone call from HedgeFund.net seeking comment.

Talk about the glue that binds a nation. I agree with Miles Mogulescu of the Huffington Post who writes that the Obama administration must stop bonuses to AIG Ponzi schemers:

It's time for some righteous populist anger from the Obama administration--not just in words, but in deeds--to stop the looting of the Federal Treasury by Wall Street executives using taxpayer money to pay bonuses to the very people who manipulated markets and were instrumental in bringing the international financial system crashing down on the heads of hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world.

If the Obama administration doesn't stop AIG from paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses, it will enable a popular uprising (led, unfortunately, by hypocritical Republicans posing as populist leaders) which will block the Obama administration from taking the actions necessary to save the financial system. It could destroy Obama's presidency and lead to a decade-long depression.

Instead, while AIG prepares to use hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to pay bonuses to the very executives at AIG's Financial Products Unit who designed, managed and marketed the credit default swaps which were little more than a Ponzi scheme, the Obama administration sends out Tim Geithner, Austan Goolsbee, and Larry Summers to lamely express fake anger to the media while defending the payments on the grounds of the "sanctity of contracts".

As Larry Summers timidly told George Stephanopoulos, "The easy thing would be to just say...off with their heads, violate the contracts. But you have to think about the consequences of breaking contracts for the overall system of law, for the overall financial system."

Even first year law students in Contracts 101 learn that there are numerous exceptions to the "sanctity of contracts". As any working lawyer will tell you, contracts are legally abrogated every day--a big part of our court system is given over to litigating disputes over the enforceability of various commercial contract provisions. If Treasury Secretary Geithner is rolling over and passively taking the advice of lawyers hired by AIG's Chairman that there are no legal defenses and counterclaims to paying the executive bonuses, then he's talking to the wrong lawyers. He and President Obama need to bring in the best litigators in the country and give them the mandate to find every available legal argument for not paying the bonuses, and then force every employee of AIG's Financial Products Unit who is unwilling to give up their bonus to hire expensive lawyers to sue for it, and vigorously defend these lawsuits through trial and up the appeals ladder, if necessary, for years, before even considering paying any such claims.

Let's clearly understand what the executives of AIG's Financial Products Unit did: As several commentators have noted, AIG's Financial Products Unit is a hedge fund grafted onto an insurance company. I would go even further--It's all-but a Ponzi Scheme grafted onto an insurance company.

AIG's principal business is selling insurance including casualty, auto and life insurance. In fact it's the largest insurance company in the world. Insurance is a highly regulated business. When a company sells insurance, government regulators require it to set aside financial reserves to pay claims. For example, if an insurance company sells fire insurance, it uses actuaries to calculate the amount of fires which are likely to occur and the likely costs of paying claims on these fires, and is required to set aside enough money to pay these potential claims. It also invests these reserves and profits from these investments. AIG's regulated insurance business was profitable and would not require AIG to take $170 billion and counting in Federal bailouts.

AIG's Financial Products Unit was instrumental in creating and marketing a new type of insurance product which purported to insure investors in mortgage-backed bonds and derivatives against losses to their investments if the homeowners who took out these mortgages defaulted on their payments. Only AIG didn't call these products "insurance policies". They called them "credit default swaps," instead.

Because AIG and other big financial institutions claimed that credit default swaps were not insurance but a form of financial security like a stock or a bond, they were not required by regulators to put aside reserves against losses.

This worked out pretty well for AIG and its high-paid executives during most of the past decade while the real estate bubble kept home prices rising, allowing homeowners to continually refinance their mortgages and make their payments--AIG profitably collected billions of dollars of premiums on the credit default swaps it sold, hardly ever had to pay any claims, and gave executives hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses for keeping the circus operating.

(It worked out pretty well for Bernie Madoff, too, who could continue to pay earlier investors from the proceeds paid in by new investors, until the financial markets crashed and investors started asking for their principal back.)

In fact, credit default swaps were little more than an (arguably) legal Ponzi Scheme which, because reserves against losses were not set aside, relied on a constant flow of new premiums to pay-off any potential losses, as well as to pay the oversized bonuses to the executives who created and sold them. In selling credit default swaps, many of which insured sub-prime mortgages, AIG executives did not perform due diligence on the viability of the underlying mortgages to determine the actual risk that mortgagees would default if the housing market stopped rising.

As a result, last September, when the housing bubble burst, and increasing numbers of homeowners stopped making their mortgage payments, the counterparties to AIG's credit default swaps demanded that AIG post hundreds of billions of collateral to secure the counterparties against the potential losses to their insured bond and derivative portfolios. AIG didn't have the money, because it had failed to put aside adequate reserves and because it had already paid out the premiums it had received in the form of bonuses to its executives and as dividends to its shareholders.

Because these counterparties were some of the largest banks, investment houses and hedge funds in the world, the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke and (then) Tim Geithner, and the Treasury Department under Hank Paulson and (now) Tim Geithner, decided that AIG was "too big to fail" since AIG's failure to pay-off the losses on its credit default swaps to these other "too big to fail" financial institutions would lead to a cascade of huge bankruptcies which would bring down the international financial system.

So far the Federal government has given AIG $180 billion to back up its credit default swaps to these counterparties, with no end in sight, and we, the taxpayers, now own 80% of AIG. Meanwhile, the AIG executives who created this disaster demand hundred of millions of dollars in bonuses and the Obama administration throws up its hands and says there's nothing it can do, as though it is powerless but to listen to AIG's Chairman and his lawyers that the bonuses must be paid.

Under these circumstances, I have no doubt that smart lawyers, hired by the Obama administration, can find numerous legal arguments for refusing to pay the contractual bonuses to AIG executives.

Without having seen these contracts, here are a few legal arguments off the top of my head: Most executive contracts provide that the executive is in breach if s/he engages in gross negligence or willful misconduct. According to the New York Times, most of the AIG executive contracts under which the bonuses are to be paid were entered into in early 2008, after the real estate bubble had started to burst and subprime mortgages started to default in large numbers.

There is a strong argument the AIG executives responsible for designing and selling credit default swaps were grossly negligent (if not willful) in failing to perform due diligence on the risk of loss that the underlying bonds would default and setting aside sufficient resources for paying claims if defaults happened. Instead, they pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses off of the premiums from prior-year's credit default swaps and made no provisions for setting aside funds for paying potential claims. This may not only have constituted gross negligence or willful misconduct--It may even have constituted criminal negligence or fraud.

If President Obama wants to avoid a populist uprising that could sink his administration, he needs to tell Geithner and Summers to stop defending the legality of the AIG bonuses and bring the full force of the federal government down on the heads of any executives of AIG's Financial Products Unit who have the nerve to claim a bonus. (As Robert Kuttner has pointed out, "the outrage over the the AIG bonuses is a sideshow. The larger problem, both financially and politically, is the entire strategy for rescuing the banks." But if Obama doesn't act forcefully to stem popular outrage by halting the AIG bonuses, he may never have a chance to get the policy right on the financial rescue.)

Obama should go on national television, explain to the American public how AIG executives used the phony insurance policies of "credit default swaps" to game the financial system, and announce that any executive of AIG's Financial Products Unit who claims s/he's entitled to a bonus will have to hire a lawyer and sue for it--and that the government will insist that every such suit go to trial and if the government loses at trial, be appealed for years before any claims are paid.

Moreover, the government will require AIG to countersue every executive that claims a bonus for gross negligence and/or fraud and will seek damages and a refund of prior year bonuses. In addition, Obama will instruct the FBI to investigate the AIG executives for criminal fraud. And he will instruct the IRS to conduct full-scale audits on the last 7 years of their tax returns to insure that they properly paid the government everything it was due on their huge incomes. He will use every legal resource at the disposal of the Federal government to make their life a living hell if they continue to claim bonuses on their ill-gotten gains.

Rhetoric denouncing the bonuses is not enough. Decisive action by the Obama administration to stop payment of the bonuses is required. Anything less threatens to destroy the credibility of the Obama administration with the American people and derail Obama's efforts to prevent a depression.

UPDATE: President Obama has just released a new statement on the AIG bonuses and unfortunately, he's blowing it by failing to express a sufficient level of populist anger which reflects the anger of the American people, or definitively state that the bonuses will not be paid, period. He follows Larry Summers and Tim Geithner by expressing faux outrage: "How to they [AIG] justify this outrage [of the bonuses] to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?" Then Obama says the Geithner is "working to resolve this matter with the new CEO, Edward Liddy, who came on board after the contracts that let to these bonuses were agreed to". (Liddy is the CEO who already told Geithner than he's legally obligated to pay the bonuses.) Obama says that he's asked Geithner "to pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses".

Not good enough. Obama has to stop being polite. He needs to proclaim that the full force of the Federal government will be brought down on the heads of any AIG executive who tries to claim a bonus.

I would throw all the crooks who ran AIG's Financial Products Unit in jail and prosecute them under the full extent of the law for criminal negligence that has caused irreparable damage to the U.S. and global economy. That's why AIG's dismal results back in August spelled trouble for pension funds.

But if you think AIG took enormous risks allowing their executives to reap huge bonuses, then what do you think about a public pension fund using the government's balance sheet to sell CDS? I would say that borders on criminal negligence too and it all goes unnoticed because nobody has a clue as to what these mega funds are doing behind closed doors.

Worse still, the global Ponzi scheme unraveled fast since last August, closing the curtains on private markets, exposing the bogus benchmarks that were governing them and ending the great pension con job.

What do pensions have in common with AIG? It turns out a lot. Both were claiming to run a core business when in reality they were fueling a Ponzi scheme using "sophisticated instruments" or "alternative investments" that threaten the security of the global financial system.

Just like AIG, most pension funds lack transparency, allowing them to operate beyond the reach of regulators. Moreover, there is no accountability or serious risk management taking place at any of these large pension funds, allowing senior managers to reap huge bonuses for taking excessive risks (typically by beating bogus benchmarks in private markets).

And just like AIG, when their financial solvency eventually reaches a breaking point, these pension funds are going to require billions, if not trillions, in bailout funds to allow them to meet their pension obligations.

You'd better get ready because Uncle Scam wants your money and there is nothing you can do to stop him.

It's more than just AIG!

Okay, so everyone is freaking out about this AIG thing, and for good reason. What I don’t get is why all of a sudden. It’s not like this is new. Outrageous bonus plans have been in effect for years and the last ten years have been some of the worst I have seen. And hey gang this is not just corporate executives getting these huge payments! It’s our government employees as well. Today the first thing any C-level candidate wants to know is about the bonus structure. I’m sick of it, but I’m not paying these people.

I just keep asking myself why do people need so much money. I mean really! I’m all for anyone making a good living. Everyone would like to have a nice home, a dependable car, the ability to send their kids to a good school, etc. But seriously – “How much do you need to be comfortable?” A six-figure income is great, but when you get past a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, isn’t that gluttony?

I don’t think the guy making millions every year looks himself in the mirror every day (or at tax time) and says, “I make too much money”. Hey dude, how about thinking about how you can use that money wisely? No not your financial portfolio, idiot – wise use of that kind of money is to help the homeless guy on the street corner. I know you can’t fix his problems, but you never know what he might do with a couple G’s.

I just ask you to think about it. Our current economic strife is more than some people can handle. It’s worse than some of us have ever seen. Remember that old saying – Pay it Forward? Lets try some TODAY!