Re: Hard working Americans
On Jul 7, 2007, at 1:35 AM, uvj@vsnl.com quoted: Hard working Americans http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=59224&videoChannel=2
Jul. 5 - Study says Americans get about half as much time off as
Europeans.
[from today’s Page Six]
Office Addiction
WORKING for Donald Trump is no vacation - literally. The tireless
developer says he’s heartened by a survey that reveals one in five
people brings a laptop and does some work during holidays, while 80
percent have cellphones to stay in touch with the office. “They don’t
want to miss what’s going on,” Trump says on his blog. “Although
vacations are supposed to be about de-stressing, some people admitted
it would be more stressful not knowing what was going on at work
while they were away. And those are the kind of people I want working
for me.”
New York Times - July 6, 2007
Trump Deal Fails, and Shares Fall Again By FLOYD NORRIS
Donald J. Trump, the man who wrote “The Art of the Deal,” failed to
make a deal this week, and his casino company’s shareholders are
suffering. Again.
Mr. Trump grew famous as a real estate developer, and some people
still think that an apartment with his name is worth more than one
without it. He became a television star in “The Apprentice,” where
his main contribution was to say to contestants competing for the
right to work for him, “You’re fired.”
That played on his strength, as was shown again this week when his
casino company, Trump Entertainment, reported it had fired two
executive vice presidents.
But when it comes to running operating businesses, he has been
something less than a resounding success. The Plaza Hotel in
Manhattan went bankrupt under his tutelage, and his casino empire has
been under bankruptcy protection twice, in the early 1990s and again
this decade.
Mr. Trump has proved to be a fine negotiator in bankruptcy. In the
last round, he got a large stock position in the reorganized company
in return for giving the company a license to use the name it already
had: Trump. He also put in some cash, and the courts turned aside
pleas from angry investors whose stakes were being wiped out.
With no buyer in sight, shares in Trump Entertainment fell to less
than $11 this week, well below the $14.60 value assumed in the
bankruptcy reorganization. Trump bonds also lost value.
Losses for shareholders are nothing new in the Trump empire. Trump
Entertainment’s predecessor company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts,
went public, owning just two of Mr. Trump’s casinos, in June 1995.
The shares did well for a time, but plunged after deals in which Mr.
Trump sold his two other casinos to the company, at prices some
deemed excessive.
When the company went into reorganization, the old shares were all
but wiped out. Each share, which cost $14 at the initial public
offering, got 88 cents in a cash distribution, and one-thousandth of
a share in the new company. Shareholders also got warrants to buy new
shares at $14.60. If they exercised the warrants, which have since
expired, they have new losses.
All told, ignoring the warrants, a shareholder who invested $10,000
in Mr. Trump’s empire when the casino company went public in 1994
would now have about $636.
That performance came at a time when the casino industry was
blossoming across America, as more states accepted more gambling as a
way to raise revenues.
I counted five other casino companies that went public in the
mid-1990s. All made money for investors in the initial offering. The
champion was Penn National Gaming, which will take your bets in West
Virginia, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Louisiana and in Ontario. It
went public in 1994, and a $10,000 investment would now be worth
about $724,000.
Over all, an index of casino stocks is up 268 percent since June
1995. Trump investors lost 93 percent.
Why did they do so badly? Mr. Trump has an explanation. “The company
has always been a relatively high-debt company,” he told me, and when
it needed money the bond markets were not always friendly.
He has a point. Trump casinos were sometimes starved for capital
investment, and they showed it. And while others expanded into new
areas as markets opened up, Trump went only to Indiana, and its
casino there was sold in 2005 to raise money. Recent efforts to
expand into Pennsylvania, Mississippi and Rhode Island went nowhere.
The company now has a $250 million investment program to improve its
Atlantic City hotels and casinos, and is spending a similar amount
for a new tower at the Trump Taj Mahal.
“The places are starting to really look well,” said Mark Juliano, who
became the interim chief executive this week, after his predecessor
retired, the company said, to “return to his family in California.”
“The refurbishment is going along nicely,” Mr. Juliano added. “We are
looking forward to a great summer.”
But there may be more than capital problems and run-down buildings at
work in the sad performance.
Trump’s companies are very complicated, with partnerships all over
the place. At best, such complexity contributes to doubts that the
boss has the same interests as public investors. Had a buyer been
found, Trump Entertainment could have owed Mr. Trump up to $100
million to offset his capital gains taxes.
The two years since Trump Entertainment came out of bankruptcy have
been good ones for owners of most casino companies. But not for this
one. Mr. Trump’s name is, again, associated with a losing investment.