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Thomas Frank: Wall Street Bonuses Are an Outrage
Just a mere $18.4 billion in Wall Street bonuses, and suddenly the entire country is screaming for revenge on money power that has done us so wrong while rewarding itself so generously.
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Phil Bronstein: Did Obama's Big Apology Turn the Salary Cap into a Magician's Hat?
Salary cap spankings for execs at bailed out giants. The President of the United States confessing "I screwed up" on national TV. This is shocking. But shocking good or shocking bad?
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Bob Rice: Capitalists, Socialists, and OPM
There's nothing wrong with Wall Streets's "eat what you kill" mentality. Except the bankers must remember that, in the wild, if the Tribe doesn't survive, no one eats at all.
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Robert J. Elisberg: Finally, a Plan I Can Bank On
Seeing the many billions of dollars are going to banks with utterly no requirement of fiscal responsibility, I am announcing today my personal expansion into finance.
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Fortune's Stanley Bing: Puttin' On The Pay Cap
The $500,000 limit on executive pay may seem like a lot of money to people, but in actuality, for a banker, you might as well be offering a salary of $1 per year.
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David Paul: Congress Should Not Cap CEO Pay, But Look at the Deeper Problems of Corporate Governance
It needs to be said: The Congress of the United States has no business setting the terms of executive compensation.
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Time to put laws into place. CEO,executives and board members are to arrogant to change. They have had to many chances and have failed. If you allow the companies to become so called "to big to fail" executive pay should be limited to 8 times or some reasonable multiple of the lowest worker pay or outsourced workers pay.
fundamentally, products and services are a response to needs and desires. products and services attempt to satisfy needs and desires in exchange for something of similar value - usually money, in one or more of its various forms.
so here's a novel, big-picture idea for serious consideration: the production and distribution of all goods and services - ie 'business' - must become, first and foremost, of genuine benefit, by every metric, to the consumers who purchase and utilize them - not the commercial enterprises that create and sell them.
wants and needs exist. if any enterprise wishes to satisfy them and profit from the experience, it should do so on terms that are reasonable and meaningful to the culture of consumers who would purchase them. if those terms are deemed unacceptable, the enterprise can always elect to forego the opportunity and leave it for another which is willing satisfy them on terms that are reasonable and meaningful to the culture of consumers who would purchase them.
the current system is completely bass-ackwards and it has resulted in the economic meltdown that has completely destroyed our financial system, seriously compromised economies around the world and severely diminished the future for most of us.
it is way-past time for a change - not more business as usual.
The HORSE IS OUT OF THE BARN...Thi
Hey, I've got an idea!
Let's take the same amount of bonus money out, but over a longer period of time. The unwashed masses will think we took a cut, and no one will be the wiser.
Teehee...
Why are people dancing around this issue of CEO bonuses and excessive salary? Make the salary's reasonable and cut out all bonuses, period, end of story. If these CEO's want to walk, let them....th
Really the Boards of Directors annually analyze this...Are you saying they are paid off by the CEO and how in the same hill is that going to be changed????
INCREASE THE TAXES NOW...
When job loss and lack of healthcare reaches a critical mass in this country that nice little bonus "culture" is not going to save these imbeciles while the masses storm the Bastille.
'"Increasingly (the focus) is moving away from the short into periods of time of three to plus years'
Still to short, it should be 7-10 years and longer would be more appropriate.
The only people deserving of a "bonus" are the stockholders not the psychopaths who are employed by them (and shouldn't be) who, as a general rule, are instrumental in the ruination of a company.
The thing that gets me most is the line of so called reasoning that these people are entitled to these bonuses because they had a contract.
I seem to recall from business law that in the event of a business bankruptcy, the first item paid is money owed for salaries.
If there are any lawyers or others on the board, would bonuses fall under that? I'm kind of thinking they wouldn't.
And finally, it would seem to me that institutions that were *effectively* bankrupt, that would have had to have filed bankruptcy if not for the bailout, should be managed as such. I realize the bailout wasn't set up that way, but I see no reason that it couldn't have been.
Oh so right, they feel entitled to these huge bonuses, yet these same folks are against the entitlements like SSI and medicare and medicaid for taxpaying Americans.
exactly, bingo, spot on! Same type of entitlement mentality goes to TRUST fund babies and the Inheritors of the WEALTH...
I have witnessed a great deal of this entitlement sense firsthand, often accompanied by the mindset that those "beneath" them are disposable.
It would seem to me though that the contracts that are being used to justify these bonuses would be voided in a bankruptcy and these companies being effectively bankrupt, the contracts voided.
Note how the right wing is trying to force bankrupcy on U.S. auto companies- a bankruptcy that would result in the voiding of contracts with workers.
Maybe not one cent above the president's salary level should be deductible to a corporation. Perhaps an equal $400,000 could be used as bonuses for any year, based on return to stockholders. Go above that and it's not deductible but it's highly taxable. Execs couldn't be contractors. Execs should have no expectation of life in the style of an Eastern potentate, especially not after bailouts. Enough.
The boards of directors are not going to go for this, because then they willl not get their 250 grand for 12 hours of work and stock options on top of that......
Why don't we get to the real heart of the problem. The board of directors for all companies are a bunch of self-serving good old boys. Most of them serve on multiple boards and it has all become very incestuous. I say legally limiting an individual to serve on the board of one company at a time only would be a good start to fixing what is wrong with corporate governance.
and personal liability for the Board of Directors and the top 1% of the company...
Well now, we couldn't have them being responsible for their decisions now could we? Because if we did that we might be fair to the share holders not to mention the employees or the society in general!
Hopefully the Wall Streeters @ Davos heard this conversation, as when they have to testify to Congress they can try and not lie tooooooooo much while they try to keep a straight face. Paulsen should also be called back to explain his inability to write a contract that protected the American public.
Info seems to be that all the Wall Street banks will need more money...so I hope they become acquainted with the idea that "Congress now has them by the short hairs"!!!
you know Paulson should have to disclose his CEO contracts with Goldman Sachs.... I would love to see those to see how he qualified for 1 billion dollars over the 10 years before he left the company...
These CEO bum freeloaders livin' off the taxpayer's tat need to get a real job.
This is nothing new to the American scene.
Greed is the foundation of American empire.
Of what 'empire' is greed NOT the foundation?
I've never seen a moving van following a hearse. You can't take it with you. I guess I'm old fashioned; you CAN be too rich or too thin.
"And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." -Book of Matthew
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Reuters | January 30, 2009 04:31 PM