...From the other side of the pond, Simon Duke reports:
Goldman Sachs is on course to pay its top City bankers multimillion-pound bonuses - despite asking the U.S. government for an emergency bail-out.
The struggling Wall Street bank has set aside £7billion for salaries and 2008 year-end bonuses, it emerged yesterday.
Each of the firm's 443 partners is on course to pocket an average Christmas bonus of more than £3million.
Time's Stephen Gandel reports:
Earlier this month, the government announced that it planned to quickly inject $125 billion of the $700 billion economic rescue package into nine of the nation's largest financial firms, including Wall Street titans Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, as well as Bank of America, which recently acquired securities firm Merrill Lynch. That, along with other Treasury Department moves to rescue Wall Street, will mean the wallets of many investment bankers will be fatter than they would have been.
Here's something from Bloomberg MUSE's Christine Harper I think you'll really enjoy!
Year-end payments at the nine banks that received $125 billion from the U.S. Treasury are under investigation by U.S. Representative Henry Waxman and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who are demanding details on the companies' compensation plans. Three of the firms, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch & Co., have already set aside $20 billion to pay bonuses this year.
That was 20 BILLION, with a "B". (At least Waxman & Cuomo seem to give a shit.)
More from Simon Duke:
News of Goldman's bonus plan came as the firm promoted 92 of its bankers to partner level. A quarter are based in Fleet Street, London.
Partnership is the holy grail of the investment banking world as the exclusive club shares around a fifth of the firm's total bonus pool.
And this from Robert Morley:
According to the report, both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are scheduled to pay out bonuses of $6.85 billion and $6.44 billion respectively.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are each receiving $10 billion from the government as part of the effort to help prop up the financial system.
Cenk cares. Here he is 5 weeks ago...
The UK Telegraph reports (why is this being reported in Great Britain more so than the U.S.?)
The Treasury is set to take a $10bn preferred equity stake in Goldman, considerably smaller than the $25bn stakes it will take in Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo, however.
In letters to the heads of the each of the nine banks involved, Mr Waxman noted that the banks have accumulated a collected remuneration pool of $108bn for the first nine months of this year, almost the same as last year, in spite of the dire state of the banking sector this year. Goldman's current compensation pool stood at $11.4bn for the nine months to August 31 – and last year totalled $16.92bn, equivalent to $564,000 per employee.
Wolf Blitzer & CNN reported on this a week ago. Where are all the diaries? Have I just missed them?
In a related Story, in March of this year, Defunct Lehman Brothers Chairman Richard Fuld was awarded a $22 million bonus for 2007. That's a nice paycheck for murdering a company.
Outrage doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about this. How can Congress let this happen? How can Treasury Secretary Paulson still have a job? Is anyone else thinking protest? Even riots? This cannot be allowed to stand!
20 billion in taxpayer bailout money so Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley can hand executives multimillion dollar stocking stuffers totalling more than 13 billion.
How does help end the credit crisis?