A quick update on avarice in America and beyond

Some people think Corporate America doesn’t care about the jobless. Not true. Corporate boards care deeply about the jobless — if those without work happen to be their former CEOs. Late last year, for instance, General Motors gave the heave-ho to CEO Fritz Henderson. But GM will be tiding poor Fritz over. He now has a consulting gig with the automaker. Henderson’s consulting rate: $3,000 per hour. Plus he gets an expense account. At Alabama’s Regions Financial, C. Dowd Ritter will this month be exiting the bank’s CEO suite, after leading Regions to $6.7 billion in losses the last two years. Ritter is leaving with a five-year consulting pact that will hand him $475,000 for 75 days of work the first year. At Domino’s Pizza, CEO David Brandon steps down this week. He’s becoming a consultant, too. His rate: only $25,000 per month. But Brandon gets to fly free on Domino’s jet . . .

Hedge funds — those unregulated pools of capital that egg on global speculation — have totally recovered from the economic unpleasantness of 2008, say researchers from the Hennessee Group, a New York investment advising firm. Assets in hedge funds rose by $751 billion in 2009, enough to return the hedge fund industry back to 2007’s “pre-crisis levels.” That’s great news for hedge fund managers. In 2007, the top 25 hedge fund managers each pocketed at least $360 million. The even better news for hedge fund honchos: Efforts to plug the “carried interest” tax loophole that lets hedge fund managers treat the bulk of their income as capital gains, the Washington Post reports, have “lost momentum in the Senate.” The House voted in December to end the loophole, a move that, if the Senate ever followed suit, would hike the tax rate on most hedge fund manager income from 15 to 35 percent . . .

America’s “deficit hawks” have their claws out — and a new target: public employees. Forbes magazine last week called cutting pay for government workers “the only way to get serious about the deficit.” The “only” way? A 10 percent salary cut for all federal, state, and local government non-teaching employees, says Forbes, “could generate almost $40 billion per year.” Here’s an alternative that Forbes hasn’t yet apparently contemplated: taxing the rich. If America’s 400 highest income-earners in 2007, the most recent year with stats available, had paid the same share of their incomes in federal tax as the top 400 did in 1955, the federal deficit would have shrunk by $47.7 billion . . .

The Welch want to be happier — and they’ve taken a first concrete step toward tracking their happiness progress. The government of Wales is planning to start collecting the statistics necessary to compute an index of “Gross National Happiness.” Gross Domestic Product stats and other traditional economic yardsticks, many researchers believe, don’t get at the factors that truly enhance “subjective well-being.” Global studies, notes Helen Mary Jones of the Welsh National Assembly, have shown that ”the best societies to live in aren’t always the wealthiest.” The best societies, she adds, appear to be nations “where wealth is shared more equally.” Agrees Cardiff University psychologist Adam Corner: “If the Assembly wants to create a happier Wales, it should pursue policies that promote a more equal society — and not just focus on generating a higher GDP.”

Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov doesn’t like taking “no” for an answer. Back in 2005 the 66-year-old widow of banker billionaire Edmond Safra gave Prokhorov that “no” when he tried to buy Safra’s cliff-top mansion on the French Riviera. No big deal. Prokhorov just kept upping his offer price — until he hit $534 million, the highest price ever offered for a private residence. Widow Lily Safra, in 2008, finally relented and agreed to sell. Prokhorov promptly put down a $55 million deposit — and then wished he hadn’t after the global recession later that year hit his business operations hard. Prokhorov reneged on the sale and demanded his deposit back. Lily Safra refused. Last week a French court backed her refusal — and ordered Prokhorov to pay an additional $2 million in damages.