Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for November 30, 2010

Too TRUE!

It’s kinda reassuring….

Way too true.

Granny Smith Blarney are moving into my home town! There’s barely 9,000 people there! How desperate can you get?!

Dumb? Smart? All depends on how much you want to get investigated.

Once again Wiley demonstrates his anti-business bias, which, of course, he constantly denies. “It’s just a joke.” Yeah, right.

BTW, until they fix it, one of the ads on the right says “Get the new Non Sequitur 2010 Calendar”. While supplies last? It’s so hard getting good help these days.

wikileaks announced late yesterday that they’d be dumping the documents of a major bank next month. we shall see.

They are selling mattress covers, but since the dollar isn’t worth anything, we will be sleeping on hard wooded slats soon.

BJR: No, Wiley has open season all all kinds of businessmen, not just banks. You could check the archives if you subscribed. Sounds to me like you have a bit of his same condition.

Sayhow: They have meds now for paranoia.

pschearer, it’s always seemed to me that Wiley is basically anti-weasel. When businessmen are weasels, he’ll come across as anti-business; when politicians of one stripe or another are weasels, he’ll seem to be anti-whatever-they-are. And so on.

If he seems to be picking on more group more often, a plausible explanation might be that that group has a higher proportion of weasels than some others.

I wonder If the firm actually had good ROI’s for their clients during those 627 days? As I recall Madoff’s clients had a nightmare reconciling their tax returns for capital investment revenues!

There use to be a day when Bankers actually tried to help you make money with your money. Now they just want your money to make themselves money.

We are living in interesting times.

It never was like that, ImaginaryFriend. Banks have always been in business to make money, just like any other business – that’s why businesses exist, and there’s nothing wrong with that, since it (usually) involves a win-win situation. Bankers may have been happy to help you make money with your money…as long as they made more. But that may have been when times were plummy; in hard times, like now, businesses are in survival mode. (Economics 101, good buddy.)

To the extent that any business operates with personal friendliness and/or a social conscience, that’s terrific and we should celebrate it whenever it happens. But it’s not a requirement for them to exist and operate, and they sure as hell don’t teach it in business school.

@pschearer, You are so right. The financial giants have shown such a fine grasp of reality and concern for their customers.

This firm should have no trouble finding customers.

When Bernie Madoff was running his Ponzi scheme, many (if not most) of his clients suspected he was doing something illegal. Their mistake was in believing it was some kind of illegal insider-trading scam, which would have left them with their profits when/if he was caught.

Wikileak that firm immediately!

The SEC IS COMING.

“If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably isn’t.”

Thanks Wiley, again you’ve hit the nail on the head with a wallop!

@pschearer,

Why are you defending bankers? What have you got to hide? A closet republican? Don’t be ashamed. We won’t think any less of you (that would be inmpossible). ;)

I’m a fiscal conservative, a business school graduate, and generally a free-market advocate. That being said, I think the bank bailout was one of the worst ways to try and deal with the liquidity problem that many banks had after the real estate bubble burst. By simply giving money to the banks to cover their losses, and offering to have the Federal Government take some of the toxic assets off of the banks’ ledgers for them, Congress did a grave disservice to the Constitutents they purportedly serve, since the banks are still left with a smaller bottom line, and are not in any way incentivized to lend more money. A more reasonable plan would have been to return the entire year’s income tax paid to the taxpayers of this nation. They in turn could have used the money for purchases, to pay down their debts, and to redeem their bad mortgages. As such, the money would wind up going ot the banks anyway, would have reduced the amount of toxic assets the banks held, and left the banks in a more liquid position while also helping “the little guy” become more liquid. Of course, the little guy wasn’t the one pumping millions of dollars at a time into the campaign coffers of Congresscritters.

@MisngNOLA, worse, the banks who were caught have no incentive to be more careful next time, to look into the chance of a bubble and avoid the risk–why bother? If it works, we’ll make money, and if it doesn’t, then Congress will save us.

wiley rules.

I was able to actually ask a member of Congress why so much free money was given to banks rather than to individuals. The answer was that there were fewer banks and it was easier to keep track that way. It’s possible that was the truth, although the feds have no trouble at all dealing with individuals when it comes to placing the majority of the tax burden.

Blarney & Associates isn’t doing anything that the federal government hasn’t been doing for the last 80 years…so what’s the beef?

They make money the Old Fashioned Way. They STEAL it!

(with apologies to John Houseman)

pschearer: most people who read the comic strips, much less comment on them, understand, that a sense of humor is a prerequisite. You need to get back on line, you forgot yours.

If you go to the NY Post cover for March 13, 2009, 627 days ago, it’s all you need to know. Wiley strikes again!

how do i contact these guys

So Friday, the 13th of March 2009 wasn’t a good day for Blarney & Associates

The Supremes, some years ago, solved the problem that a business (at least a corporation, now a full person!) has the absolute obligation to maximize profit, at the expense of anything else.

Mom-n-Pop businesses may get away with having a social conscience, but if they incorporate and sell shares, look out!

And that’s why the term “Banksters” was coined.

If corporations could go to jail (might take some BIG handcuffs) this might be fixable.

“Inside Job” is a great documentary film that exposes it all – on both sides from the Depression to Reagan & onward to Obama.

To all those who addressed me directly:

When Wiley is funny I laugh. There are many comic strips set in the business world, mostly making fun of bad bosses and inane policies, which I saw enough of in 35 years in the corporate world, but Wiley, more than any cartoonist I can think of, consistently implies businessmen are immoral per se. That is what I will continue objecting to every time he resorts to it.

There are many more immoral businesses and businessmen than there are cartoons made by Wiley and all other cartoonists. Don’t let the bee into your bonnet.