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If Obama were a real man he'd rip into this company and tear it down limb by limb.
Goldman Sachs ready to hand out £7bn salary and bonus package... after its £6bn bail-out
By Simon Duke
Last updated at 8:55 AM on 30th October 2008
U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs HQ which has set aside £7bn for bonuses and salaries this year
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.
The size of the pay pool comfortably dwarfs the £6.1billion lifeline which the U.S. government is throwing to Goldman as part of its £430 billion bail-out.
As Washington pours money into the bank, the cash will immediately be channelled to Goldman's already well-heeled employees.
News of the firm's largesse will revive the anger over the 'rewards for failure' culture endemic in the world of high finance.
The same bankers who have brought the global economy to its knees seem to pocketing the same kind of rewards they got during the boom years.
Gordon Brown has vowed to crack down on the culture of greed in the City as part of his £500billion bail-out of the UK banking industry.
But that won't affect the estimated 100 London partners working at Goldman Sachs's London headquarters.
The firm - known as Golden Sacks for the bumper bonuses it pay its top bankers - is expected to cut the payouts by a third this year.
However, profits are falling much faster. Earnings have plunged 47 per cent so far this year amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
This has wiped more than 50 per cent off the company's market value.
The news comes after it was revealed that even bankers working for collapsed Wall Street giant, Lehman Brothers, could receive huge payouts.
Its 10,000 U.S. staff are expected to share a £1.5billion bonus pool. The payouts were agreed as part of the rescue takeover of Lehman's American arm by Barclays last month.
The blockbuster handouts caused consternation among London employees of the firm, many of whom have now lost their jobs.
Even workers at the nationalised Northern Rock will scoop bonuses worth up to £50million over the next three years.
The extraordinary handouts include more than £400,000 for Rock's boss, Gary Hoffman, who is likely to become Britain's best-paid public sector worker.
The majority of Northern Rock's 4,000 workers will receive four separate bonus payments - the first of which will be made next March. Staff will get an extra 10 per cent on top of their basic salary.
Lloyds TSB also intends to pay its employees bonuses despite taking a £5.5 billion emergency cash injection from the taxpayer.
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.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo last night warned that Wall Street firms taking government-money risk breaking the law if they hand the cash straight back to employees.
Cash-strapped workers are being penalised by pay rises which are far below the soaring cost of living, research reveals today.
Despite inflation soaring to a 16-year-high of 5.2 per cent, the average worker got a pay rise of just 3.8 per cent in September.
The research, from the pay specialists Incomes Data Services, highlights the financial problems facing millions of workers.
Most of their household bills, particularly food and fuel, are rocketing by up to 35 per cent. However, their meagre pay rise does not begin to cover the extra cost.
The majority of the 50 pay settlements investigated by IDS were in the private sector covering around 1.1million employees.
They range from just 2 per cent for workers at the BBC to 5.3 per cent for workers at a firm of dockyard workers.
Incomes Data Services warned pay rises are likely to fall even further over the coming year as inflation is expected to drop sharply.
Economists predict inflation will fall below the Government's 2 per cent target next year.
Find this story at www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1081624/Goldman-Sachs-ready-hand-7BILLION-salary-bonus-package--6bn-bail-out.html
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The entire bail out is a criminal REPUG enterprise, robbery in broad daylight, in the last weeks of the dubya/ head criminal administration.
If Obama were a real man he'd rip into this company and tear it down limb by limb.
Is anyone surprised by this?
I don't know about being "surprised" by this, but it still makes me angry!
Paulsen said he couldn't attach strings, as the UK did, because it would discourage financial ins utions from participating. I say, then, 'em.
So the financial failed pigs take the $Bs to shore up their balance sheets, pay bonuses to failing mgmt, dividends to investors (and executives holding stocks), and buy up weaker banks, concentrating against consumer choice and compe ion.
But $Bs not for more credit/loans which was the extortionist lie Paulsen used to scare up support for his joke-y $700B 3-pager.
I know you're a ing idiot, but Congress controls the purse strings for the bailout, and I know this probably comes as a shock to you but Dems are in charge of Congress.The entire bail out is a criminal REPUG enterprise, robbery in broad daylight, in the last weeks of the dubya/ head criminal administration.
But who am I kidding, Pelosi and Obama could cut the checks and deliver them to the execs themselves and you'd still lay the blame at the feet of the Bush Administration.
Exactly the like the bogus Iraq war, the Paulsen bailout is purely a Repug INITIATIVE, invented, shaped by Repugs.
I wish BushCo would show some leadership here. I guess we'll have to wait for the NY AG to stop this.
How is this relevant? The Dems voted for it.
STFU if you have no valid answer to that simple, easy to to understand fact (Dems voted for the bailout).
I've been on a bonus plan at work, and guess what?...we didn't get if the company didn't make money. These lavish unconditional bonuses are the old way of doing business, when investment banks were afraid to have their talent poached. Newsflash: there are investment bankers working at Wal Mart and your local car wash...tens of thousands of them. It's a new day. Close the purse strings.
Banks' most important assets are its employees. They don't have machinery to invest in, they don't have PP&E, they don't have R&D departments, they don't use sophisticated software (compared to manufacturers) . . . basically there is no heavy capital expenditures aside from compensating there top employees.
I agree this is a time were bonuses should be reduced drastically. Nevertheless, it was not all bankers' fault the credit crunch we are in. In fact, it was a small group of them who were involved in mortgage related business and some of the derivatives that caused this mess.
The market will come back and talent will go elsewhere.
That's why Pelosi and Frank were leading the charge and giving all the press conferences... they're really just puppets of the Bush Administration. [/boutons]
House vote:
Senate vote was 74-25 with over half the votes in favor of the bill being cast by Democrats.Yeas Nays PRES NV
Democratic 172 63
Republican 91 108
Independent
TOTALS 263 171
Damn Republicans.
It's not a function of the market. The investment bank as an en y may no longer exist. The glut of unemployed investment bankers isn't from downsizing. The companies are GONE. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs aren't even real investment banks anymore. They turned themselves into bank holding companies in order to be able to borrow cheaply from the Fed for survival, and are now regulated like regular banks. Lehman and Bear Stearns are gone as if they never existed.
Investment banks as we know them have disappeared. Investent Bankers, OTOH, are not a dying breed. They are still alive and kicking (and a little bruised) at JPM-Chase, Citi, CSFB, BOA, (who acquired ML), UBS, Deutsche Bank and many others. Activities such as M&A, Bond Underwritting, Derivatives, IPOs and many others are performed by I-Bankers and will continued to be performed by them in the future.
boutons has been left speechless.
That's why Pelosi and Frank were leading the charge and giving all the press conferences... they're really just puppets of the Bush Administration. [/boutons]
House vote:
Senate vote was 74-25 with over half the votes in favor of the bill being cast by Democrats.
Damn Republicans.
dayum!
Joe six pack, Joe the plumber, o the builder and everyone else got owned
Wait a minute... they were supposed to lend that money!
I wonder why that wasn't written into the bill. Actually, no I don't.
We certainly do live in interesting times when the government can steal from its citizens and hand the money over filthy rich bankers... and it's all on TV! Congratulations... you will spend part of your time this year laboring so that banking execs on Wall Street can get their usual yearly bonuses... in case you were wondering who you really work for.
What did I say about the NY AG?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/08/opinion/08sat1.html
New York's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, sent a letter last week to all of the banks that got money from the Treasury Department asking for information about their bonus pools. He already has used laws on fraudulent payments to convince the American International Group, the insurance giant, to suspend some bonuses.
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