Bank Bonus Scandal. One Solution.

Here we go again.  Bank Bonus Scandal Season.

Banks are paying out pretty much every spare dollar to employees.  Each one, you see, has to pay tons of freshly printed money to keep all the talented stars that guided it so well to the bottom of, well, a well, that it had to look up for a bucket of Government aid.  Which aid was attached to a thick rope needed because of that bank's largeass (which is Latin or Greek for... it's obvious).

The Feds forced the banks to shed a few hundred million pounds (converted into dollars, it's more) of largeass so that the Treasury could crank the banks up out of the metaphorical well.

Some banks were so crazed to regain their largeass that they actually paid the Feds back.  All the better to restore the bonus practices that rewarded top producers of catastrophes, less these valuable types flee to... another well, I guess.  Citi, which never sleeps, paid employees so much it ended up with a loss.

How do those bonuses compare to investor dividends, kind of the reason to buy a bank stock in the first place?  Sorry, but if you see dividends out there, you might want to see a shrink.

All the Bernanke's, Geithner's and Dodd's in the world can't solve this bonus dilemma.  Surprise.  But I can.

Pay all bank bonuses in Nano-Dollars.

Nano-Dollars were invented by Quants, the Geeks of Quantum theory investing fame, even before Venezuela double devalued its Bolivar.  Nano-dollars are the way I make... will make money off of this blog (although the offer to sell it out to non-bank corporations for free speech purposes remains open.  I doubt banks will be bidding after today).  If you click (please, one lousy click) on the Google Adsense or Amazon ads on this page, I get, like, a zillion nano-dollars.  A nano-dollar is too small to see.  You can't even ponder how many get sucked into a black hole (a gravitational well, you know, like your VISA). 

The nano-dollar is something around 10 to the minus nine dollars.  It is a lot smaller than a quantum dot and harder to see than that tenth of a cent in interest you are getting for your regular dollar presently stowed safely in a money market account (instead of that Pacific Rim ETF sitting at the bottom of another well I don't want to think about).  Nano-dollars won't disappear into your couch, assuming your furniture was not repossessed along with your house, because they were never in you pocket in the first place.

The key is that a bank could give billions of nano-dollars to its CEO, CFO, CTO and CFSO (the newly created Chief Free Speech Officer) and still have plenty of regular dollars to give shareholders, a class that includes your mutual funds, by the way.  Of course, they can't pay their Quants with nano-dollars because Quants know how unmeasurable nano-bucks are without an electron microscope. 

Fortunately, all the derivative and hedge fund hawkers don't understand physics, negative exponentials or long division any better than mortgages.  They will hurry home all puffed up and wave their nano-dollar checks at their spouses.  "Look, Darling.  I got a bonus for 2009 of Ten Billion Nano-Dollars!  I'll bet that asshole Jones, next door, will positively sh_t himself!"

You know that asshole Jones, who probably works for a bank, too, will.  Positively.  And next year, he'll demand a of billions in nano-dollars.  Soon, Warren Buffet will be pricing his stock in nano-dollars so you can buy some Berkshire Hathaway shares without hitting the lottery or going to Heaven.

It sounds very workable to me.  In the meantime, I'm about to have several zillion more nano-bucks to invest in nano-slots in Pittsburgh's new Casino, all thanks to a single click on that Google ad on the right column of this blog.

You promised.

Party's over, Geeks

No more worshiping Geeks  Not for me.

Or you, either, if you're smart (but not too smart).

Not after what I read yesterday on the Wall Street Journal site. Normally, you would only want one of their guys to write an editorial for your birdcage, but not this time.  Reporter Scott Patterson outs the Geeks in his book "The Quants" and published an article about it for those of us who can't get through a whole book.

Maybe that "Quants" designation is short for Quantum Theorists but it basically means "Geeks".

You think the world is topsy turvy now?  Then it was turvy topsy before it became the current tospsy turvy.  Wall Street used to run by investment bankers, security lawyers and people so rich they owned the bankers and lawyers.  Somewhere along the line, it appears, the Geeks took over.  It took a while, as they gradually crafted all the programs that controlled buying, selling and inflating stocks.  Pretty soon, the Geeks had their own investment vehicles and, no, not mint '57 Chevy's.  And those Geeks drove their fancy vehicles right into the East River in late 2007, faster than a recalled Camry.

Which is fine, except they dragged the rest of us pedestrian investor types with them.

Time was, you wanted your precious daughters to marry doctors, quarterbacks, even security lawyers.  Now, you'd jump at an assistant manager of the Geek Squad or a master of Grand Theft Auto.  Geeks have their own TV shows, too.  On the one I  watch, "Chuck", the head geek is at least as spy, too.  The geek on "Numbers" is practically FBI.  But along comes "The Big Bang Theory", raising geeks who are just geeks to near-Emmy status.

And we loved all the damned geeks. Me, too.

Not any more, pal.

The geeks are the ones who modeled harmless mortgage-backed securities into the derivatives that even Greenspan didn't understand.  And they created a virtual stock market that acted so much like the real thing, they thought it was the real thing.  Only, they weren't smart enough to program their own panic into their algorithms.  Thanks to them, your 401K is worth less than a truckload of wet Chinese drywall.

So lock up your daughters--and maybe your wife, for that matter--when the next nerd comes over to reboot your WiFi-n router or make your Bluetooth mouse actually point at something.  Do not let your kids watch "Big Bang Theory".  No more video games like Resident Evil 5 or Guitar Heroes, Beatles or not.  Get them  "War and Peace" or a catcher's mitt.

I'm not saying geeks are evil or not funny, but if one lives next door, quietly report him to TIDE or the local neighbor watch, at least. Remember, it's your daughters we're talking about.