The Venture Edge

It seems like every time I turn on the news, some commentator or talking head is claiming that the U.S. economy won't get better until the government brings certainty into the financial or regulatory or tax or whatever [insert favorite excuse here] situation.

The golden Cinderella carriage that is the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program -- TARP, for short -- will in just a month-and-a-half's time become a pumpkin when legislation that authorized the Department of Treasury to buy or insure up to $700 of "troubled assets" expires on December 31, 2009. The funny thing is that, as of October 1, 2009, more than $317 billion of the $700 billion remained unspent. Why? The exact reasons are fuzzy, but maybe there just aren't that many more troubled assets for Treasury to buy up or insure.

One of the hot topics in business today is executive or management compensation.  With Congress firmly convinced that businesses and their shareholders can't make wise decisions about how to compensate their people, a number of compensation reforms are being floated that have a common theme--government telling businesses how and when to compensate their employees. 

There's hardly a more interesting time to be in Washington DC than now (apparently the President didn't agree with me because he was in Burbank yesterday).  No, I did not come to Capitol Hill to beg for a piece of the stimulus pie, although it seems that everyone else has and no one seems to know how we'll pay for the pie.  The cafeteria of the Rayburn Congressional Office Building was jammed with lobbiests plotting and planning how to snag some bucks from the government (that's us).