Astronomical Pay For CEOs And Employees

[fused]

"Wall Street firms have shared profits liberally with employees. The five biggest -- Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns -- paid their 185,687 employees $66 billion in 2007, as problems with subprime mortgages mounted, including about $39 billion in bonuses. That amounts to average pay of $353,089 per employee, including an average bonus of $211,849. The five firms had combined net income of $93 billion during the five years through 2007."

CEO Pay Doubled

"The $3.1 billion paid to the top five executives at the firms between 2003 and 2007 was about three times what JPMorgan spent to buy Bear Stearns. Goldman Sachs had the highest total, with $859 million, followed by Bear Stearns at $609 million. CEO pay at the five firms increased each year, doubling to $253 million in 2007, according to data compiled from company filings."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aGL5l6xOPEHc&refer=home

Are you kidding me!

[MattH]

When my employers fired our CEO a couple of years ago, his severance was over 100 times my salary at that time; should I get laid off (and there are signals that layoffs may be coming later this year), I doubt I'll get a century's worth of severance.

[BBYGRL]

Unbelievable.   Bail them out my butt!  I wounder if they all paid taxes.

[Helena_313]

I'm kind of glad that this is taking the attention off of "Big Oil" for a little while.

[BBYGRL]

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Helena_313 wrote:

I'm kind of glad that this is taking the attention off of "Big Oil" for a little while.

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They took a hit today. I doubt if we will benefit from it anytime soon.

[Helena_313]

Oh, I know they took a hit. One of the majors dropped a clean 9.7 or so percent, and I haven't looked at the other 5 yet. I'm just saying that right now, it's not Big Oil that looks like the terrible, horrible, awful institutions that they are frequently made out to be.

Message Edited by Helena_313 on 09-29-2008 06:09 PM

[BBYGRL]

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@Helena_313 wrote:
Oh, I know they took a hit. One of the majors dropped a clean 9.7 or so percent, and I haven't looked at the other 5 yet. I'm just saying that right now, it's not Big Oil that looks like the terrible, horrible, awful institutions that they are frequently made out to be.

Message Edited by Helena_313 on 09-29-2008 06:09 PM

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You're right. It sounds like "Big Oil" issues are taking a back seat to the economic crises. Call me crazy, but I wonder if this was by design...the price of oil more than doubled in the past year. They made out like bandits. The price not much of an issue - just our dependence on foreign oil. Things that make you go hummmm...

[Anonymous]

Those snipers that shot the innocent people in Northern Virginia / Richmond... had they gone after "enrons" they'd be heros. If too few have too much of the wealth, they need to remember that we are a country full of guns. The true purpose of Welfare is to the keep the poor fed a bit so they won't revolt and go after the rich, but the rich are getting a bit too greedy. There was just a case in India where the laid off workers just bludgeoned their CEO to death. Crazy.

[hbmcracer]

I wonder if every CEO of every company in the country took a 50% pay cut, if that would be $700B for the bailout.  I bet it would be close.  That's where the money should come from.

[MattH]

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@hbmcracer wrote:

I wonder if every CEO of every company in the country took a 50% pay cut, if that would be $700B for the bailout. I bet it would be close. That's where the money should come from.

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Perhaps 1000 companies are big enough to pay their bigshots these preposterous amounts. So if we tried to take half of $700B from the hides of 3500 bigshots, that would be about $200 million per bigshot. But these folks mostly get from around a million per year to maybe ten or twenty million at the upper end, not $200 million. So there just are not enough dollars available from the bigshots alone unfortunately.

And that's the fundamental problem here: those running the show have created a mess far bigger than they can clean up. If a group of small children play with fire and burn down the house, you can scream all you want about making them fix up their mess but it will not rebuild the house.