Public nuisance

I don't buy newspapers and I don't do Twitter, but I came across this tweet from Andrew Neil.

Andrew Neil ‏@afneil

Every single well-paid job in flimsy Sunday Times appointments section is in public sector. Not one private sector job ad.

Sums up the nation's problems in a nutshell. While private sector pay is being driven steadily down towards Eastern Europeans, Indian and Chinese levels, those high up in the public sector persist in thinking they are worth hefty six figure salaries. Net result: a £150 billion deficit.
Add to that the Northern city whingers who complain that the cuts in grants from central government will jeopardise the core services they provide to the most vulnerable in society. Such as the laptops that get handed out to school kids that councils in the rest of the country can only dream about.  Still it will hit cities like Liverpool, hard, so it is a good thing that Liverpool already have the maximum amount of cash reserves permitted by the Audit Commission stashed away, savings made when they were awash with bribes cash from Labour.
Details of local government spending cuts are given in a report by the IFS here, but suffice it to say, if northern cities are given per capita grants of £1,500 per person or more while southern rural districts are given £850, then the softy soutrherners are hardly likely to give a sympathetic hearing to Northern cities who complain about attacks on the disadvantaged when those disadvantaged are still benefiting from grants that are hundreds of pounds higher than their own.

The worst CEO's of 2012

Who were the worst chief executives of 2012? Sydney Finkelstein thinks he knows. The longtime professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business is the author of 11 books with such titles as Why Smart Executives Fail and Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions, so he knows a thing or two about utter failure. He’s been putting out his list for three years now, and last year it included the chief executives of Netflix (NFLX), Research in Motion (RIM), and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). Here’s the list for 2012 (except where noted the companies didn’t respond to a request for comment):

1. Brian Dunn, who resigned as chief executive of Best Buy (BBY) in April after allegations surfaced that he had an inappropriate relationship with a much younger subordinate. That’s not why he’s on the list, though. Declining stock price, cratering same-store sales, loss of market share to more nimble competitors, and an addiction to share buybacks that cost the company $6.4 billion with little to show for it—that’s why he’s on the list.

2. Aubrey McClendon, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy (CHK) who apparently has trouble keeping his company’s finances and his own apart. According to Reuters, McClendon borrowed as much as $1.1 billion over three years in undisclosed loans against his stake in thousands of company wells and ran a $200 million oil-and-gas hedge fund on the side, an “obvious conflict of interest,” Finkelstein says. Use of the company jet (and company employees) for personal purposes and a corporate sponsorship deal for Oklahoma City Thunder while McClendon was an owner of the basketball team also didn’t help. 
Jim Gipson, a spokesman for Chesapeake Energy, declined to comment.

3. Andrea Jung, who stepped down as chief executive of Avon (AVP) in April but remains as chairman through the end of this year. Jung has been unable to fix the company’s operational problems, failed to groom a successor, and turned down a $10.7 billion offer from the beauty-care company Coty that, in retrospect, it should have leaped at. Since 2004, the company’s market value has fallen under her watch from $21 billion to $6 billion. And the company has had to spend $300 million in legal expenses related to allegations that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars bribery of foreign officials.

4. Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga (ZNGA), the mobile gaming company that brought the world Farmville,among other online distractions. Zynga stock is down 75 percent so far this year, and the company is losing top executive talent. Pincus has a fairly illustrious pedigree—he got a bachelor’s degree in economics from Wharton in 1988 and his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1993. But Finkelstein says he’s made some rookie mistakes, including hitching his company’s wagon much too securely to Facebook (FB), which Zynga relies on for a big chunk of revenue. And he hardly expressed confidence in the company’s prospects with his move to unload 16 million shares after the IPO lockup period ended. 
Joe Libonati, a spokesperson for Zynga, declined to comment.

5. Rodrigo Rato, who resigned as chairman of the Spanish lender Bankia (BKIA) in July. Rato is one of Spain’s former finance ministers and a former managing director of the IMF. Rato has an MBA from the UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business. In 2011, Bankia announced profit of €309 million; after Rato resigned, it was restated to a €3 billion loss. Rato is under investigation for fraud, price-fixing, and embezzlement in connection with Bankia’s spectacular collapse and bailout by the Spanish government. Carmen de Miguel Hombria, a spokesperson for Bankia, declined to comment.