Wall Street Bonuses Get The Taiwanese Animation Treatment (VIDEO)

For news presented as a bizarre video game-like montage, there's nothing quite like Taiwan's Next Media Animation. In a new video released Friday, the studio has turned its unforgiving lens on Wall Street.

As the Wall Street Journal reported almost a month ago, financial firms are on track to pay employees $144 billion, to break a record for the second year in a row. NMA offers an understandable, if inaccurate, take on this figure, putting the news in the context of the financial crisis.

"After the mortgage crisis, US bankers are giving themselves $144 billion in bonuses! Does that make you angry?" NMA, which has also produced hilarious videos about, among other people, Carl "Kooky Carl" Paladino and Christine "Colorful Christine" O'Donnell, tweeted Friday.

The new video is designed to stoke the flames of outrage, with images of bankers eating dollar bills from a trough that Uncle Sam fills. When the subtitles say that "This year, Wall Street bonuses are set to reach record levels," a masked person walks into something called "AIG Bank," draws a gun and steals a bag of money -- a vivid depiction indeed.

WATCH the video below:

Comments

[HappyVomit]

05:38 PM on 11/08/2010

Hilarious yet sickening at the same time. And I reckon there's more emotion shown on these computer generated automatons than on the real-life engineers of this financial debacle.

[kdwestphal]

08:39 AM on 11/08/2010

How about the Dems propose taxing people who make $25 million a year. Will the Republicorps still object? Yes!!!! If the Dems then can't bring up the cost of the war, the cost of protecting the rights of people to make $25 million a year in this country, the benefits of a civil society, they DESERVE to lose!

[JohnSawyer]

03:55 AM on 11/08/2010

The right can't be taught by things like this, because they've developed their own Bizarro world view of the cause of the economic collapse, which they don't deviate from: they say it was caused by Democrats in Washington creating regulations that required lenders to give loans to people unqualified to pay them back. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is their primary boogeyman. Nothing factual can change their minds about this, largely because they're not interested in the facts, but instead they want stories they can hide behind as "reasons" for their attacks on the Democrats.

They deliberately ignore facts like these:

- Loans issued under the CRA to lower-income people, have a higher-than-average repayment record than even normal loans made by institutions not operating under the requirements of the CRA.

- Lenders went crazy issuing bad loans, not because they were required to, but because they knew they could resell most of the bad loans to Wall Street.

- Wall Street repackaged those bad loans with reasonably good investments, and got their ratings agencies to falsely rate the entirety of these packages as AAA.

- Wall Street sold those poisoned, ticking time bomb investments all over the world, and then those so-called investments failed due to other manipulations by Wall Street.

- The repeal of Glass-Steagal, which made much of all this possible.

- The list goes on.

[Matthew Harrold]

09:52 PM on 11/07/2010

You know it's bad when the Taiwanese are taking pot shots at you. You know it's really bad when those pot shots, done in badly animated form, are pretty much close to the truth.

I wonder what happened to the poor cat?

[rainkitty]

11:18 AM on 11/07/2010

"Top executives today don’t get rich making the sorts of investments that create jobs and make their companies more efficient and effective. Those investments may take years to produce positive results. Instead, 21st century execs take the fast track to fortune. They manipulate their corporate share price. The higher and quicker their share price rises, the bigger their personal windfall — since top execs get the vast bulk of their pay in stock-related compensation...A generation ago, corporate executive pay didn't work that way. Corporations, before the 1980s, gave out far fewer and smaller stock awards. With no fabulous stock jackpot to cash in at the end of the rainbow, executives had no great incentive to manipulate share prices. Since then, stock-based awards have sent executive pay soaring..
Corporate CEO pay last year ran nearly 300 times average worker pay. If lawmakers decided to deny our tax dollars to companies that pay execs over 25 times worker pay — the corporate pay ratio back in the mid 20th century — execs would suddenly have little incentive to play their merger, buyback, and dividend games. Why bother? No juicy jackpot would any longer beckon.
With no incentive to swing for the jackpot fences, these execs just might find themselves doing what they should have been doing all along: help figure out ways to produce the products and services that consumers truly value."

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010104010/recovery-why-our-ceos-dont-give-hoot

[ItsBarranti]

08:28 AM on 11/08/2010

Exactly! With 90% Income and 25% Capital Gains taxes, there's no reason for the Wealthy to risk everything on dodgy investments; instead they'll play safe, sane and sober - which is the only way to steadily win (and was responsible for 24% average annual growth between 1946 and 1963)

[Truth9834]

12:23 AM on 11/07/2010

Some truth here. However the problem is lack of jobs which created the housing/bank loan crisis. Yes, banks did loan out too much money, and yes Wall Street did get large bonuses that they did not deserve. All true, but the underlying problem is not the banks, Uncle Sam's bail-out or Wall Street. The problem is their are no good paying jobs as these jobs have been outsourced to India or China.

Bottom line is without a job you can't pay your mortgage.

Remember the economic theory we were told in school? Ok, so we move the manufacturing jobs to China, big deal, go back to school, get your degree, and get a good paying "white collar" job. Remember? Well, guess what, the blue collar / manufacturing jobs went, to a large extent, to China and now? Yes, the white collar jobs are headed to India or are already in India. The economic crash we are seeing is the transfer of middle to high paying white collar jobs to India with its "English" speaking highly educated population.

We need to fix this "outsourcing" problem or we will one day be a third world country.

Good day to you, fellow Americans who I love with all my heart. We are the greatest nation in the world and we will fix this problem.

[Boor123]

10:44 PM on 11/06/2010

The funny thing is: this is not CGI. They are actual, pasty, robotic, inhuman bankers.

[voltage356]

10:40 PM on 11/06/2010

All Tea party members should view this video every night before they go to bed.

[carolina919]

08:49 PM on 11/06/2010

Young Tiwanese animators "get it" and it's still hard for some here in America not to see. I'd love to see what they could do with the TARP, created as one last raid on the Treasury by Hank Paulson for Goldman Sachs and Bush and Co once they realized that John McCain would not be President.

[tjinc]

12:35 AM on 11/07/2010

Carolina, The TARP handout... a Bush administration double-down; conveniently swept under the rug by the GOP and not shown the light of day by the dems... very unfortunate. When will the Democratic Party leaders get it that the American public has the memory of a gnat? So what if the repubs try to paint the reminder of the TARP bailout as "ancient history"? Does the Democratic Party know ANY good PR firms? Any? Help!!!

[carolina919]

02:55 PM on 11/07/2010

faved, my friend. You are RIGHT on the money. If all those Hollywood types really want to help they'd better start using some of their creativity pronto because the blitz is coming. Did you notice that NO Republican used their party affiliation this election cycle? Darryl Issa on Bill Mahrer said the country rewarded the GOP because they listened to their outrage over the Bush years...(and of course, Bush wasn't a real conservative anyway). The GOP has used the propaganda techniques of repetition, co-option and innoculation to a fare thee well with the Rushbo, Glenn Beck programs and really do a nice "soft sell" as well as "swift boating". I KNOW the GOP pays better PR folks....but do your country a favor. Enlist on the side of the angels for once.

[Senpay]

08:45 PM on 11/06/2010

The more of these I see, the more I want to move to Taiwan. Tai hao le!

[dubbleplusgood]

08:25 PM on 11/06/2010

bankers greedy. washington blind. hulk smash.

[atomicdog68]

08:18 PM on 11/06/2010

Enough said.

[VietVet]

06:43 PM on 11/06/2010

Looks about right to me....

[Tom808]

06:34 PM on 11/06/2010

I find it interesting that people from capitalistic societies in Europe and Asia see the US as capitalism run amok while our electorate reengages with those who would further reduce controls on capitalism.

[Balzac]

05:06 PM on 11/06/2010

Good video.