(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
| Pay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of US government bail-out package
The sums that continue to be spent by Wall Street firms on payroll, payoffs and, most controversially, bonuses appear to bear no relation to the losses incurred by investors in the banks. Shares in Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have declined by more than 45% since the start of the year. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have fallen by more than 60%. JP MorganChase fell 6.4% and Lehman Brothers has collapsed. At one point last week the Morgan Stanley $10.7bn pay pot for the year to date was greater than the entire stock market value of the business. In effect, staff, on receiving their remuneration, could club together and buy the bank. |
Money for nothing . . . but your chicks aren’t free (just ask former Gov. Spitzer)
| … while Mr. Madoff was apparently a self-conscious fraud, many people on Wall Street believed their own hype. Still, the end result was the same (except for the house arrest): the money managers got rich; the investors saw their money disappear.
We’re talking about a lot of money here. In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing – and it probably was – we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse. |
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On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real In all, Merrill handed out $5 billion to $6 billion in bonuses that year (2006). A 20-something analyst with a base salary of $130,000 collected a bonus of $250,000. And a 30-something trader with a $180,000 salary got $5 million. But Merrill’s record earnings in 2006 – $7.5 billion – turned out to be a mirage. |
Who said anything about a class war? These guys have no class.
| As regulators and shareholders sift through the rubble of the financial crisis, questions are being asked about what role lavish bonuses played in the debacle. Scrutiny over pay is intensifying as banks like Merrill prepare to dole out bonuses even after they have had to be propped up with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. While bonuses are expected to be half of what they were a year ago, SOME BANKERS COULD STILL COLLECT MILLIONS OF DOLLARS |
Tiny bubbles . . . make me laugh!
| “The financial services industry was in a bubble,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “The industry got a bigger share of the economic pie.” |
Missing the point of bonuses?
Do we really need to inject rational thought into the process. . .
Am I missing the point of bonuses? I always understood them to be tied to performance, either that of the individuals or that of the company. But the company almost went bankrupt this year and the executives demonstrated themselves almost cosmically hapless. If they were going to get bonuses, then what could the term possibly mean? Bonus for what? A working cardiovascular system? |
Well, sometimes reality can seem like a dream . . .
| Five-figure bonuses stun Chicago plant workers Owners of ball bearings company reward workers for years of service CHICAGO – Dave Tiderman wondered if the decimal point was in the wrong place when he opened his $35,000 company bonus. Jose Rojas saw his $10,000 check and thought, “That can’t be right.” Valentin Dima watched co-workers breaking down in tears over their bonus checks and didn’t trust his emotions. He drove home first, then opened his envelope: $33,000. Year-end bonuses are rare these days. Rarer still is what the Spungen family, owners of a ball bearings company in Waukegan, Ill., about 40 miles north of Chicago, did as they sold the business. |
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ek hornbeck state of mind. . .
20-something analyst collected a bonus of $250,000?
Hey! What about me? Where’s mine?! What am I doing wrong?
Don’t I suck up enough? Maybe I should take up living on my knees? Sell my shredded soul?
What?
It’s situations like this that the racketeering laws were written for, and said laws allow for both arrests and seizure of suspected criminal assets before the trial. Personally I’d like to see the DEA handle this, they have plenty of practice in fucking people over, and these people need to be on the receiving end. I truly believe this shit won’t stop until strong measures are taken.
Early morning puke!
What saps we’ve been or been taken for!
REGULATIONS!
And, yes! ACCOUNTABILITY!
P.S. Happy to see you made the second level — good on ya’!
Mine.
I can remember the milkman delivering to the house. The doctor actually made house calls and in the summer a guy on a three wheeled vehicle would come around and sharpen knives and scissors for people.
I rather think the bonus plan is more a part of the accellerated Illuminati Plan to Destroy America because even the random events of our demise far exceed the statistical probability of such things happening.
By calculation and design.
Brings me right back to those Georgia Guidestones and Alex Jone’s Endgame.
I don’t think that the Spungen family choice will be the top model as to business decision-making taught at business schools around the nation. In reality, their almost certain continue efforts to build a long-term business, profitable for themselves while also treating workers almost certainly reasonably (better than as part of the family, considering how families fight?), is where we really should want businesses focused rather than the daily stock price.
Now, with the possible exception of ‘green’ programs, what we’d really benefit from having shut down for a few years would be the nation’s business and finance schools as they have truly done well in creating a class of people with competence to guide businesses and the overall economy to a stronger situation.
where privilege is conferred by birth and association not merit
where the new aristocracy is the recipient of the fruits of the rape of the last doubling of consumption and production on our planet
and the hobosapiens aka surfs should go quietly die somewhere else
the other night
it was about research on the effects of taxation
the cato institute delivered the program
I was left with a deeply haunting feeling
it struck me that all of the efforts of the gentleman giving the presentation was to keep the system called global capitalism on the road of growth
it never entered the conversation to consider the concept of a throughput limited world with little or no growth
in fact the basic conclusion of the entire research was that if global capitalism did not grow in the 3 – 4% range it would fall over
someone needs to tell that gentleman that at 3% growth the aggregate activity doubles in approx. 24 years
awhile back we accounted for a good deal more than 2/3 of the biotic output of the planet
there is no more planet and no more throughput to account for this fairy tale
this amounts to compelling the human race to invest in a huge pyramid scheme
and we all know that the ones who win a pyramid scheme are those who enter first, at the beginning
if we do not repudiate capitalism soon we will all bestow, as our legacy to those that come after us, a world dead and unable to support life as we know it