Bailout

Sob story of the day, Glen Esnard edition

By Felix Salmon

Somebody should tell the senior executives of Grubb & Ellis that their president of capital markets, Glendon Esnard, is mad as hell, he’s not gonna take it any more, and that in fact he is seriously considering leaving the country altogether:

Apparently our president thinks that living in America is so wonderful that we will never leave, despite being directly attacked and held responsible for the political class’s inability to constrain its desire to buy votes with our money. He should think again.

“We”, here, in case you were wondering, is that beleaguered and demonized class of people making more than $250,000 a year. They We are being vilified by no less than the President of the United States himself — “for his own personal gain”! And let me tell you, they we are suffering. Take poor Glendon himself:

I have no funded retirement plan save Social Security, if it is there when I need it. I have no guarantee of permanent health care. I am paying off school loans for our three children. A meaningful number of my friends have lost their jobs, and all who are still employed, including my family, have taken significant pay reductions. My brother-in-law has been told to take every Friday off with a 20% cut in pay, but his work load hasn’t changed. Everyone I describe here earned over $250,000 per year.

I’m sure that Glendon, with his 30 years of commercial real estate experience and his extensive knowledge of both investment sales and the alternative real estate investment market, has managed to amass a decent nest egg by this point. Still like any good socialist, he still hankers for a defined-benefit pension and a guarantee of permanent health care. He’d surely love it if the government paid for college education, too. Probably that’s why he’s thinking of leaving the country: he’s decided that he wants to move to Sweden. Or maybe France.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on September 14, 2010 (boomark / email).