Goldman Sachs' Shareholders Seethe

You can add some of Goldman Sachs' (GS) most important shareholders to the growing list of agitators who do not approve of the firm's plans to pay out record bonuses this year. The Wall Street Journal scoops the field this morning with an article about some of the firm's largest shareholders who believe Goldman should not be lavishing vast sums on management but instead should be turning over some of its "blockbuster earnings to investors." This truly is new ground for a normally staid investor group, the newspaper points out, adding that "their complaints in private conversations with the company and at analyst meetings show how anger over its big-money culture is spilling into the ranks of investors who typically shy away from debates over Wall Street pay." One major beef: Goldman is planning to pay out record bonuses even while earnings per share at the firm will come in 22 percent below the 2007 level. "Shareholders have said that reining in the bonus pool would deliver an upward jolt to per-share earnings and the share price, according to people familiar with the discussions," the newspaper writes, citing people in the know.

The Financial Times adds further analysis this morning to Goldman's much-criticized announcement earlier this week to launch a $500 million fund to help mom-and-pop businesses. What many see may as a questionable attempt to defuse public anger over gaudy bonuses may have another motive. Now, the FT wonders, was it merely a ploy to help the firm satisfy a 32-year-old law "designed to prevent banks from discriminating against minorities and poorer neighborhoods?" 

To Washington now, where the question has been raised: Should Congress have the power to audit the Federal Reserve? Such a move is one step closer to reality now after the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday voted "to carry out sweeping new oversights of the central bank’s policy decisions and operations," the New York Times reports. The proposal, conceived by the GOP's chief Fed-basher, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, comes despite fierce opposition from the Fed itself, which fears such a move "would undermine the central bank’s political independence and gravely threaten its credibility as a bulwark against inflation." Another House Republican from Texas, Rep. Kevin Brady, meanwhile, took aim at Timothy Geithner, demanding the Treasury Secretary's resignation yesterday. The WSJ reports that "Mr. Geithner, in an unusual public display of pique, fired back. 'What I can't take responsibility is for the legacy of crises you've bequeathed this country,' he told Mr. Brady." Both publications attribute the populist attacks to growing frustration over rising unemployment and lingering anger over the bailout of Wall Street.

The tech sector in general thinks it's on the road to recovery, but none of that upbeat feeling is being felt at Dell today. The PC maker saw its quarterly profit drop 54 percent, "raising questions about the personal-computer maker's strategy of focusing on profitability at the expense of market share," writes the WSJ. Dell's (DELL) results are thrown into greater relief when you consider that Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM (IBM), Cisco, Intel (INTC), and Microsoft (MSFT) all have reported positive results in recent weeks. Talking of a certain Redmond, Wash., behemoth, Microsoft is delighted to report that its new operating system, Windows 7, is both performing and selling well—so well, in fact, that Microsoft has moved "twice as many copies of Windows 7 in its first few weeks than any previous version of the operating system," another WSJ piece notes. It's the sort of good-news Microsoft story that makes veteran tech watchers hark back to the software glory days of the late 1990s ... a period AOL would dearly like to return to. Instead, the former online powerhouse announced yesterday that it will cut one-third of its work force once it has spun out of its disastrous merger with Time Warner (TWX) next month. Some 2,500 jobs will go at the company that failed to adapt to a non-dial-up age, reports the NYT. In 2004, far past the peak of its perceived powers but when it was at its most bloated, AOL had more than 20,000 employees.

Staying in the world of disruptive media, Oprah Winfrey will pull the plug on her syndicated TV chat show in 2011 as she turns her attentions purely to a new cable channel she intends to launch, the WSJ writes. Oprah's been propping up daytime free-to-air TV since 1986, and her show still averages 6.6 million viewers per week. Her leaving will create a huge advertising hole that local TV stations will struggle to fill and will also hit CBS, which syndicates the show. But the move is also a risk for Winfrey herself, as she bets "that her popularity and golden touch with programming can sustain an entire cable channel and that she’ll remain a central cultural figure even without the mass exposure of broadcast television every day," the NYT notes.

For fiscal hawks, we're about to enter a lost decade, as Uncle Sam is now expected to rack up $9 trillion in public debt between 2010 and 2019. CNNMoney.com calculates much of that gaudy sum will be in the form of interest. "More than half. In fact, $4.8 trillion" will be nothing more than interest payments, CNNMoney.com bluntly writes.