"How much should a Wall Street CEO get paid?" The question got bandied around on Thursday night at dinner -- by a bunch of Wall Street CEOs.
The question was the topic of the day following coverage of the extravagant ways of John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, who spent $1.2 million on his office furnishings: $28,000 on curtains, $10,967 on a lampshade, $1,400 for a waste-paper bin, $88,000 for a rug and so on. Media speculation centered on a $35,000 commode -- until it was pointed out that the commode was a cupboard.
Still, people were furious with Thain, who had sold Merrill to Bank of America in September without telling BoA's chief Ken Lewis about nearly $15 billion of losses on his balance sheet or that he planned to push through billions in bonuses to his Merrill staff, unusually -- ergo surreptitiously -- before the end of the year. All this was to be paid for, in part, by the government bail-out money given to the merged bank. In retrospect, no wonder that a few months ago he was the only CEO on Wall Street with the gall to ask for a $10 million bonus at a time when the government was dolling out survival packages.
The man is clearly completely oblivious of the times. He needs to rewind Obama's inauguration address and listen over and over to the part about greed and excess.
Thain's extravagance has not only cost jobs but poor Lewis has had to go back to the Treasury, cap in hand, to beg for more taxpayers' money -- $138 billion, to be precise.
So when the CEOs at dinner started knocking around speculative figures and one ventured: "$15 million maybe?" I decided to speak up on behalf of taxpayers, now bank owners.
"You guys are speaking vernacular that is PS [pre-socialization]. You have to stop. Let's assume you don't pay yourselves anything until you actually start making profits that pay me back -- the person who has subsidised your $80,000 carpet." There was silence and head-scratching and muttering that maybe I was right.
And since we are talking about $80,000 carpets I have a new idea for anyone who runs a bank or firm subsidized by government money. Office photos should be mandatory and publicly displayed so we can be sure our taxes aren't subsidizing photo-shoots for interior decor magazines.
This article was originally published by the London Evening Standard
you possibly throw away in a $1400 waste basket? Then it occurred to me ...why of course!...MONEY!!
And with and $88k carpet you would surely need $10k shoes that would never soil such a fine piece
of floor covering.
And on and on and on........
Can anyone tell me what lasting productive value Wall Street provides to our economy? They are paid
to allocate money and manage risk effectively as a service for a fee. No one here seems to know
how to do that anymore. What DO they teach at Harvard BS and Wharton and Yale and MIT these days?
(Minnie the Moocher, Cab Calloway)
WilliamBanzai7
Sing along link: http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=33nTnawq6jk&feature=related
Hey folks here's the story bout Kenny the bailout moocher
He was a low down Charlotte BAC hoochie coocher
His was the roughest toughest banking sob tale
But Kenny had an appetite as big as a TARP subsidized whale
Hidehidehidehi (hidehidehidehi)
Hodehodehodeho (hodehodehodeho)
Hedehedehedehe (hedehedehedehe)
Hidehidehideho (hidehidehideho)
He messed around with a bloke named Thain
He wanted the Merrill Bulls or he'd go completely insane
Thain took him round to Chinatown
And showed old Kenny how Wall Street gangstas kick the gong around
Hidehidehide-LEVEL 3 (hidehidehidehi)
Whoah (whoah)
Hedehedehede-GREED (hedehedehedehe)
A hidehidehideho CDO (hidehidehideho)
Kenny had a dream bout yet another financial supermarket
It would give him things that he was needin
It would give him a palace built of gold and steel
A diamond studded Learjet with platinum wheels
A hidehidehidehidehidehidehi (hidehidehidehidehidehidehi)
Hodehodehodehodehodehodeho (hodehodehodehodehodehodeho)
Thain sold Ken a herd of mad cows and a boatload of subprime manure
Each meal Ken ate was full of surprising new derivative courses
Had a billion dollars worth of taxpayer nickels and dimes
He sat around and counted them all a million times
Hidehidehide-LEVEL 3 (hidehidehidehi)
Hodehodehode-CDO (hodehodehodeho)
Hedehedehede-GREED (hedehedehedehe)
Hidehidehide-HOSED (hidehidehideho)
POOOOOOR MAN
POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR MAN
POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR MAN
(I don' know why this bothers me, maybe because Aristothenes deserves better, but Cloud Cuckoo Land is often misused to imply something akin to an insane asylum. It is not. It was supposed to be a Utopia, where the heroes of the story "The Birds" went to escape the lunacy of modern life. No sooner do they set up their new, free society then the banes of modern life show up to ruin it: the real estate agent, the tax assessor , the lawyer--and this was written 2300 years ago.)
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
Getting paid quarterly would make sure the boss is actually paying attention to his job.
Wall Street is not even close to being "normal".
You are paid millions of dollars to DO YOUR JOB. Isn't this enough motivation for you to meet your performance targets? Are you saying that you won't try hard enough unless you get a multimillion-dollar bonus on top of your gigantic salary? Not to mention the millions in signing bonuses you got when you joined the company?
Out here in the real world of work, we are expected to do our best on our jobs even when our pay is cut, our hours are cut, or we are forced to do double duty because the company laid off too many employees. Bonuses are few and far between. Our reward for meeting performance targets is that we get to keep our jobs.
If you pampered Wall Street CEOs expect to be showered with millions (billions!) of taxpayer dollars, you should agree to work on STRAIGHT COMMISSION. No salary, no signing bonuses, no year-end bonuses, no exit packages, no lavish perks.
How about these whiz kids not only put off taking a paycheck until they see a profit, but they also face fines or jail for wasteful spending that borders on fraud or embezzlement.
They need to be taken down a peg or two or five hundred.