By Al Lewis
It's almost Christmas and I'm still going through my closets to
see what I can regift to the many great business and economic minds
on my list:
For President Obama, I found a bright-yellow book: "Building a
Website for Dummies."
For Thorsten Heins, former CEO of BlackBerry: Etch A Sketch.
Ohio Art will be around a lot longer than BlackBerry.
How about Meg Whitman? Hewlett-Packard stock traded at more than
$45 a share when she joined its board in January 2011. She was
named chief executive in September 2011 and by November 2012 the
stock traded below $12. H-P has since returned to profitability and
the stock now trades above $28. The improvement has been largely
driven by cost cutting and mass layoffs. For this performance, Ms.
Whitman just got a 50% raise, from $1 million to $1.5 million in
annual salary. I'm giving her the Easy Bake Oven.
Jamie Dimon, J.P. Morgan Chase's chief executive, agreed to
several multibillion-dollar legal settlements this year all because
of ambitious employees within his giant bank who can't stop
monkeying around with other people's money. I'm getting him Barrel
of Monkeys. But Mr. Dimon may never get all the monkeys out of the
barrel.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spent $3 trillion reviving
the economy. Now he's retiring and leaving the Fed's unprecedented
financial position to Janet Yellen. Here's a game they can play
under the Christmas tree: Don't Spill the Beans.
AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong lost his cool and fired a guy
during a live conference call with 1,000 employees. Mr. Armstrong
has had to fire a lot of folks with the shutdown of Patch, a
collection of local-news websites. He'll probably be good at
Whac-A-Mole.
I'm getting a DVD for former Apple executive Ron Johnson, who
became CEO of J.C. Penney and nearly destroyed the iconic retailer:
"Wreck-It Ralph." Internet Movie Database describes the film: "A
videogame villain wants to be a hero . . . but his quest brings
havoc to the whole arcade."
Jacob Lew, former chief operating officer of too-big-to-fail
Citigroup, became our nation's 76th Treasury Secretary. This is
like putting a BP executive in charge of the Environmental
Protection Agency. I'm buying Mr. Lew a rubber chicken. Maybe it
will keep him from the rest of the hen house.
Mary Schapiro stepped down as head of the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission and joined the board of General Electric, a
company her agency sued three times for fraud and kickback schemes.
For her, the cops-and-robbers play set by Playmobil. I hope she
won't have trouble picking which side she wants to be on.
Robert Benmosche, CEO of bailed-out insurance giant AIG,
defended the $450 million in bonuses paid to employees after AIG's
near-collapse. He said criticism of the bonuses "was intended to
stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitchforks
and their hangman nooses, and all that -- sort of like what we did
in the Deep South."
He sounded like he wanted a new necktie, but I'm going to get
him Minion Tim, a singing action figure based on the film
"Despicable Me 2."
Does anybody out there have a Christmas-gift idea for a famous
underperformer? Post it at tellittoal.com/xmas.
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Al Lewis is a columnist based in Denver. He blogs at
tellittoal.com; his email address is al.lewis@tellittoal.com
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