The Daily Background
| Wall Street pays out more than $18 billion in year-end bonuses
by Arlen Parsa
Ugh:
By almost any measure, 2008 was a complete disaster for Wall Street — except, that is, when the bonuses arrived.
Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.
That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.
I don’t understand how the boards of these companies can be so out of touch when it comes to bonuses.
Perhaps the most egregious example is AIG, which was bailed out for $153 billion late last year at taxpayer expense. And the company, despite promising at the time that its executives wouldn’t get bonuses and other fancy perks, has given them them once and twice, and three times since then (did they really think nobody would notice?).
Update: President Obama comments on this matter, calling it “shameful”:
