Follow-ups on Previous Posts (052907)
EU carbon emissions were up 3.6% in 2006. The US’s were down 1.3%, as noted in a weekend post.
Though those facts were known on about May 17 and May 23, respectively, a May 26 New York Times story (may require free registration) on how “The United States has rejected Germany’s proposal for deep long-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions” omitted those inconvenient truths.
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Having ripped the Home Depot and departed CEO Bob Nardelli often (previous posts relating to Nardelli’s departure are here, here, here, and here), it’s only fair to note that this year’s annual meeting appears to have been a big improvement, but not across the board:
At first, it seemed that everyone was on the same page. The new chief executive, Frank Blake, took the stage and apologized for last year’s infamous annual meeting, when Nardelli refused to take questions from investors, and members of the company’s board stayed home, at their leader’s urging.
“There is no better way to deal with a mistake than to acknowledge it, fix it and move forward,” Blake said. “We apologize for last year’s meeting. It was a mistake, and we won’t do it again.”
But in an interview minutes before the meeting, the company’s lead director, Kenneth G. Langone, strongly defended Nardelli’s leadership and pay, both of which came under withering criticism before the board asked him to step down in January.
“We needed the best. We got the best. Bob saved Home Depot,” Langone said.
He said Nardelli was worth “the full value” of his pay, roughly $270 million over six years. “I am never going back away from it.”
Given that Nardelli’s pay is the subject of at least one shareholder suit, what else could Langone say? As to saving Home Depot, Nardelli couldn’t have screwed up what was a good thing worse if he had tried. The share price performance of the company versus Lowe’s tells the tale, Mr. Langone.
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A post last week on the overreaction to April’s 11% drop in the median selling price of a new home — the drop was attributable almost entirely to a change in the sales mix to lower-cost regions — noted that the real decline after factoring out the mix problem was in the neighborhood of 1.2% in the last month, and 1.5% in the past year. This fact was totally ignored by Martin “Where’s the Bad Economic News?” Crutsinger of the Associated Press.
Sure enough, the April National Association of Realtors existing-home sales report, which is less vulnerable to regional fluctuations, came in showing a 0.8% decline in the past year. What’s more, the Excel spreadsheet supporting the NAR announcement (link is at the same page) shows that the nationwide median existing-home selling price went UP 1.2% from March 2007 to April 2007, and went up in every region of the country (Northeast, +1.9%; Midwest, +3.5%; South, +0.7%; West, +1.0%).
Sorry about those erroneous estimates (:–>) — but only about 10% as sorry as Martin Crutsinger should be for not explaining the obvious problem in a nationwide Commerce Department report.
