Wall Street firms prepare to pay $30 billion in bonuses

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley all received taxpayer help, and made the news due to bonus programs last year — which were enabled in part by the taxpayer help. Now it appears that Wall Street is ready for more. The bonuses are expected to surpass the last high, reached in 2007, before the financial market collapse, of $26.8 billion. And it really doesn’t matter what anyone says. Bloomberg reports on what seems to be the prevailing attitude on Wall Street:

“Wall Street is beginning to resemble Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in the film ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’” Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate on compensation at the Portland, Maine-based Corporate Library, said in an e-mail. “It doesn’t seem as if even political threat, disastrous PR, envy, rising unemployment rates and home repossessions is enough to get any of these people to refuse the bonuses they have ‘earned.’”

Clearly, Wall Street has policy makers nicely sewn up, and populist outrage doesn’t affect Wall Street because it clearly does little to prompt lawmakers to take action. So, while thousands stand in unemployment lines this holiday season, it will be little comfort to know that their Wall Street counterparts are enjoying record bonuses.

Image source: Fletcher6 via Wikimedia Commons

Post from: EveryJoe

Wall Street Set to Give Out Record Bonuses

The news is getting a little bit better. Today, it was revealed that the unemployment rate has actually dropped. This is a surprise, since analysts had forecasted a rise from 9.5% to 9.6%. Instead unemployment eased down to 9.4%. This news is heartening, and could be an indicator that the recession is winding down, and the effects on the “regular folks” are starting to reverse.

Of course, that doesn’t make most of us feel better about the trillions that went to bail out banks during the Bush II Administration (don’t forget: then-Treasury secretary Henry Paulson was a Goldman CEO in a former life), and the billions that still went to them after the change in political leadership. But at least the bottom of the pyramid is starting to see some positive changes.

Post from: EveryJoe

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