Are You Pissed With The Bankers' Pay???

So they (JP Morgan) made $3.59 billion.

But get this.. they are setting aside $7.3 billion to pay their staff!

Which means the bank is on track to payout $29 billion in pay and bonus!!!!

Does this make sense?

WTF is wrong with our world today?

Where and what are they lawmakers doing?

Is the world really ruled by the bankers now???

Is any sane person out there who is NOT ANGRY WITH WHAT THESE BANKERS are doing?

Hell yes! I am utterly pissed!

Sigh.

JPMorgan heralds return to bumper bonuses

• JPMorgan Chase heralded a return to the golden days of Wall Street bonuses after delivering $3.59bn (£2.25bn) in profits and setting aside $7.3bn to pay staff.
  
  By James Quinn, US Business Editor
  Published: 4:01PM BST 14 Oct 2009
  
  The global banking conglomerate – best known in Britain as the parent company of investment bank JP Morgan – has now set aside $21.8bn in compensation for employees for the first nine months of the year. Should it keep it up, the bank will be on track to hand out as much as $29bn in pay and bonuses this year
  
  The news – combined with expected confirmation on Thursday that Goldman Sachs is on track to pay out as much as $22-23bn in its bonus pot this year – is likely to reignite the row over bankers' pay.
  
  Across the board, Wall Street banks are expected to collectively dole out more than $140bn by the end of the year, a record figure for the US banking sector, beating the previous high of 2007.
  
  JP Morgan Chase appears set to dole out as much as $29bn in compensation at the year-end, a 27pc rise on the last two years, when its total pay pool has amounted to approximately $22.7bn each year.
  
  This year’s bumper pay-out, which will be paid in mid to late December, is therefore likely to equate to $131,304 for each of the bank’s 220,861 employees, compared to a $100,906 pay-out for the 224,961staff the bank at the end of the last year.
  
  JP Morgan received $25bn in financial support from the US government, money it repaid in June, and has handed over a package of linked warrants to the Treasury, which will auction them off to the highest bidder by the end of the year.......

Posted this morning: Bankers To Be Paid Much, Much More In Bonuses!

Bankers To Be Paid Much, Much More In Bonuses!

Highlighted by Jesse: Wall Street Set to Pay a Record $140 Billion In Bonuses Topping 2007

While the world suffers, Wall Street pays itself record bonuses, larger even than the peak year of 2007, by taxing the productive economy to maintain an extravagant lifestyle. These bonuses are being paid with your money, and your children's money, if you hold US dollars.

And while this happens, the US credit card banks are raising interest rates to 20+% even on customers with excellent payment records and jobs which is certainly usury, and with an arrogant impunity. The insider trading scandals and tales of government graft yet to be told are so blatant and shocking that only a captive mainstream press keeps them from being investigated.

The rest of the world looks on in shock and amazement. What has gone wrong with America? What are they thinking? America has not only lost the high ground, it is sliding into a ditch.

While Americans are pacified by bread and circuses, the rest of the world looks at a painful reality show in the States, a country in a death spiral of corrupt leadership and public apathy. If it was Zimbabwe or Iceland there would still be sympathy for the people, but far less concern.

A deflationist friend was railing about the US slide into bankruptcy, and I could not help but ask, "What happens to the paper of a bankrupt company, or country?"

Where indeed will the dollar gain its long anticipated strength, its renaissance of value?

Or yes, from "less dollars" through debt destruction. Mutant monetarism gone mad, an argument worthy of Herr Goebbels. The dollar will rise in value by immersing itself in a pool of corruption, and by destroying its shareholders, those who hold their savings in it, while oligarchs loot the financial system. Unless the US can turn its trade balance positive overnight, while raising interest rates, and maintaining a growing domestic economy based on consumption, it is not going to happen. The US is running out of degrees of freedom.

Wall Street holds the US public and government hostage by threatening financial armageddon if they do not get what they wish. We would anticipate a similar threat to the global economy based on dollar debt at some point, asking for a global monetary regime controlled out of New York and London, with perhaps a few associates.

Nothing goes straight up or down. There will be more sucker rallies and bubbles, but the train is starting to come off the rails a little more with each wrenching turn of this cycle.

The banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, and balance restored to the economy before there can be any sustained recovery.

Finfacts Eire

• Wall Street firms set to break new records in 2009 with pay rising to $140bn; Bailed-out insurance giant AIG paid “retention bonuses” to kitchen staff
  By Finfacts Reporting Team
  Oct 14, 2009 - 6:10:22 AM
  
  Wall Street firms are set to break new records with employee pay set to rise to $140bn this year. Meanwhile, it has been reported that the bailed-out insurance giant AIG paid “retention bonuses” to kitchen staff earlier this year from a $168m pot, that was ostensibly designed to keep staff from leaving the government controlled firm.
  
  Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did in the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.
  
  The Journal reports that total compensation and benefits at the publicly traded firms it analyzed, are on track to increase 20% from last year's $117bn -- and to top 2007's $130bn payout. This year, employees at the companies will earn an estimated $143,400 on average, up almost $2,000 from 2007 levels.
  
  Average compensation per employee at investment bank Goldman Sachs, is set to reach about $743,000 this year, double last year's $364,000 and up 12% from about $622,000 in 2007, according to the Journal analysis...

-------------------

See also Goldman Sachs $20 Billion Bonuses?!!! and What's Wrong With Our Financial Worlds?

Folks keep asking me, is the worst over?

Oh can it ever be over when the very same financial institutions are still running the rule? Yeah, is our world now truly run by the financial markets?

How can things get better when NO reform is made on the very same financial system that had brought the world to its knees recently?

And these very same people are to be rewarded more?

What for?

These bankers take on insane risks and when they fail, they get bailout. And now they are being rewarded with more money?

Are they serious? Or are they out of their minds?

Capitalism rules?

The rich elite gets richer and needless to say, screw the poor!

Is the worst over when there is a foreclosure filing every 13 Seconds?!

Oops... who cares! The worst is because the financial markets says so! Loooook at the stock markets! Can't you see what it has been telling you for so many months already?

Damn!

Life is certainly good as long as you are in the financial markets! Heck the kitchen staff is even getting retention bonus!

What a wonderful world!

ps: please don't forward this to ALL THE ANGRY AMERICANS!

Do see this video on MSNBC.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Goldman Sachs $20 Billion Bonuses?!!!

On CNBC, Charlie Gasparion: Goldman Faces PR Dilemma Over Huge Bonuses

• Rival banks are eagerly awaiting this week's earnings announcement from Goldman Sachs not only for the third-quarter results but for how the firm deals with up to $20 billion in bonuses just a year after it received federal bailout money during the height of the financial crisis....Goldman received $10 billion of federal bailout money last year. But more significantly, Goldman benefited from the government's bailout of troubled insurer AIG because it held insurance contracts on debt that were made good once AIG was saved.
  
  On top of that, Goldman was able to be classified as a commercial bank, even though it doesn't hold substantial amounts of deposits from consumers.
  
  Because of that status, Goldman can borrow from the Federal Reserve's discount window, and more cheaply in the private markets to finance its trades, particularly in the fixed income market, one of the major drivers of its earnings.

Stinks like hell, yes?!

In an older posting: What's Wrong With Our Financial Worlds?

Written by Paul Krugman in his NY Times editorial: Reform or Bust

• ............
  What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.

That's exactly the problem isn't it?

Isn't it so clear?

Why are the executives still being paid with totally obscene money??

Why should they be insanely rewarded when they aren't "correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses"????

Want Bailout money? Tell Your Employees No Bonus First!

Here's a simple suggestion.

" Want bailout money? Tell your employees, no bonus first! "

Not acceptable?

Then no bailout money!

And the CEO and all the executives can cry a trillion tears about their bonus as stated in their contract obligations.

AIG: Are You Ashamed Of Your Utterly Disgusting Greed??

Blogged the other day: AIG, Your Bonus Plan Is Obscene!

AIG can argue their justification to pay the bonus due to contract obligations but let's think for a moment.

Without the tax payers bailout money, would AIG have any money to pay these bonus out?

Yes?

Whose money is this, huh?

And since it's the tax payers money, they damn right have an excuse to be piss like hell on what is happening!!

It's simply ludicrous and scandalous!!!

And to all you AIG employees, are you even ashamed of what your utterly disgusting greed?

And one of the better developments is Congress vows to tax back AIG bonuses

• WASHINGTON — Democratic leaders in the U.S. Congress, brimming with anger over $165 million U.S. in bonuses paid to executives at American Insurance Group, vowed Tuesday to recover the funds with a special tax unless recipients returned the money voluntarily.
  
  Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, said lawmakers plan to introduce legislation as early as Wednesday to claw back up to 90 per cent of the retention bonuses awarded to employees at the giant U.S. financial company, which has received more than $170 billion in federal assistance to stay afloat.
  
  "When a child breaks his curfew, he should get grounded. When someone commits a crime, he should be punished. And when an employee brings his company and our economy to the brink, he's not rewarded with multimillion dollar bonuses paid by the taxpayers," Reid told reporters on Capitol Hill.
  
  In a letter to AIG executives, congressional Democrats asked the company to renegotiate the bonuses and said refusal to co-operate would be met with "severe tax penalties."
  
  New York Senator Chuck Schumer, in a speech on the Senate floor, said: "We plan to tax virtually all of it. To those of you getting these bonuses: be forewarned, you will not be getting to keep them."
  
  The tax ultimatum came amid new revelations that the bonuses included payments exceeding $1 million each to 73 top AIG employees. The controversy has become so heated that one conservative Republican senator, Iowa's Charles Grassley, suggested the AIG bonus recipients commit suicide out of shame.
  
  AIG executives need to follow the "Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, 'I'm sorry,' and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide," Grassley told a radio station in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
  
  AIG spokesman Nick Ashooh called Grassley's remark "very disappointing." The GOP senator on Tuesday explained his comment was "rhetoric," and said that his preferred option was to use taxes to recoup the bonuses.
  
  "From my standpoint, it's irresponsible for corporations to give bonuses, at this time, when they're sucking the tit of the taxpayer," Grassley said.
  
  Congress has had its sights trained on AIG since last fall when it received $85 billion in emergency loans from the Federal Reserve — the first of several bailout instalments. It was later learned the company paid for executives to take a $440,000 corporate spa retreat, and an $86,000 partridge hunting expedition, even as the firm was being rescued from collapse.
  
  The company recorded a $61.7 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2008, amid fallout from the collapse of its business in risky financial derivatives such as credit-default swaps.
  
  In a letter Tuesday to congressional Democrats, New York state Attorney-General Andrew Cuomo revealed that 73 employees of AIG's financial products unit — the division responsible for the bulk of the company's losses — had been rewarded with bonuses in excess of $1 million.
  
  The top seven bonus recipients received cheques of more than $4 million each, while 22 executives were paid of $2 million or more. The top payment was $6.4 million. Of those employees who received more than $1 million in "retention" bonuses, 11 are no longer working for AIG.
  
  AIG says it was legally bound to pay the bonuses because of contracts negotiated before the company received aid from U.S. taxpayers. But the company's lawyers failed to recognize "it is only by the grace of American taxpayers that members of Financial Products even have jobs, let alone a pool of retention bonus money," Cuomo said.
  
  Outstanding questions about how the bonuses were negotiated will be the focus of a congressional hearing on Wednesday, when lawmakers will question AIG's chief executive officer, Edward Liddy, about the payments.
  
  At the same time, the Obama administration is facing growing scrutiny as critics questioned whether Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did too little to try to scuttle the bonuses before they were disclosed publicly last weekend.
  
  After learning of the pending bonuses, Geithner sought to negotiate reductions with AIG executives, but ultimately agreed the company was legally bound to make the payment. President Barack Obama has since instructed Geithner to explore "all legal avenues" to block the bonuses.
  
  "What I want to ask, where was the secretary of the Treasury before this money was paid out?" asked Senator Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate banking committee. "He either knew or should have known about what was going on (because) Treasury is deeply involved in this bailout."
  
  White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said later Tuesday that Obama continues to have "complete confidence" in Geithner.
  
  In addition to planning legislation specifically taxing the AIG bonuses, Democrats are also weighing a broader bill to impose a surtax on all bonuses paid to Wall Street firms receiving a federal bailout. One proposal would place a 60 per cent tax on bonuses exceeding $10,000 at companies in which the government has more than a 79 per cent equity stake. Currently, only AIG meets that threshold.

Taxpayers vent against AIG bonuse

• For many Americans who could use a bailout just to balance their checkbooks and make it through the month, the thought of their tax dollars going to million-dollar bonuses for AIG executives is enough to make them furious.
  
  "It's difficult to comprehend how screwing up gets you rewards," said George Padilla, a teacher in El Paso, Texas. "I tell my students that if they don't put in the effort and get passing grades, I will not pass them." He added: "I use the old `In the real world ...' line to point out that you would be fired if you didn't do well in your job. Well, I guess `the real world' proved me wrong."
  
  Workers, business owners and taxpayers interviewed across the country this week fumed over the $165 million payout, with some questioning whether the government should even be in the business of bailing out Wall Street — an attitude that could dangerously undermine further efforts by the Obama administration to prop up the economy.
  
  "Wasn't Obama supposed to fix this?" said Maria Panza-Villa, a mother of two in Hillsboro, Ore. She said she has lost three jobs since November as one employer after another folded.
  
  The intensity of the populist fury became plain when a member of the Senate, Iowa Republican Charles Grassley, actually suggested AIG executives should follow the Japanese warrior example and resign or commit suicide.
  
  While many ordinary Americans said Grassley's comments were out of line, others weren't so sure.
  
  AIG executives are "not going to bleed to death because I'm not sure that they've got blood. I think it's ice water that runs through their veins," said Gary Jarvis of Herron, Ill., who lost his job as a forklift driver in a factory closing two years ago. "To me, it's just stunning to think they're not even ashamed of their disgusting greed."
  
  AIG — teetering on the brink of collapse because it insured many of the toxic mortgage-backed securities at the vortex of the financial crisis — has mostly been an unknown quantity to the general public, in part because its business is so complex.
  
  But paying bonuses to people responsible for nearly bringing the company, and the economy, to its knees may be even more incomprehensible to nearly anyone who runs a business or tries to balance a household budget.
  
  Among those frustrated is Everette Clark, mayor of Marion, a town of about 7,000 in western North Carolina. The town has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state, at 12.2 percent.
  
  Marion's biggest industries, textiles and furniture, have shed thousands of jobs over the last few years. The people who used to work in those plants are struggling to pay their bills without any kind of a bailout or bonus.
  
  Giving tax dollars to AIG to pay bonuses is "atrocious," Clark said. "You don't reward people in the private sector for doing a bad job."
  
  David Ziegler, a long-distance trucker finishing breakfast at the Mother Load Diner in the old gold mining town of Idaho Springs, Colo., said the AIG bonuses had convinced him that the U.S. should stop bailouts altogether.
  
  "I don't think they should be pumping more money to AIG. I don't think they should flush any more money down the Citibank toilet. I don't think they should flush any more money down any of these toilets. Tell them to 'sink or swim,'" said Ziegler, who is from Thornton, Colo.
  
  Others interviewed were reluctant to place political blame and signaled continued support for efforts to fix the economy.
  
  "We've created this mess. Everyone's responsible for allowing executives to receive these bonuses," said George Ayoub of Toronto, Canada, an American who was visiting Los Angeles. "Probably every company needs to be nationalized, and the government will own the corporations instead of the corporations owning the government."
  
  Tess Beauchamp, 58, owns Stein's Coffee House, a small restaurant in Lubbock, Texas. She understands the insurance business, having worked for years in maritime coverage as a broker for fleets of ships. But that does not make her inclined to cut AIG any slack.
  
  "I think this country has a serious problem with executive entitlement," Beauchamp said as she awaited the arrival of Tuesday's lunch crowd. "I think it's outrageous. I think this country could stand a redistribution of wealth and not to AIG executives or corporate execs, for that matter."

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AIG, Your Bonus Plan Is Obscene!

On Bloomberg News. Summers, Lawmakers Call AIG Bonus Plan ‘Outrageous’

• Summers, Lawmakers Call AIG Bonus Plan ‘Outrageous’
  By Timothy R. Homan and Margaret Chadbourn
  
  March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Obama administration officials and lawmakers lambasted plans by American International Group Inc., the insurer rescued by the government, to dole out $1 billion in bonuses and retention pay to employees.
  
  Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council, called the payments “outrageous” in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” program. AIG is “abusing the system,” Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the House Financial Services Committee, told “Fox News Sunday.”
  
  AIG, which has received $170 billion in taxpayer money, succumbed to demands from the U.S. Treasury to scale back the payments. AIG agreed to reduce some retention payments in 2009 by 30 percent and tie bonuses to the company’s recovery. The New York-based insurer still plans to hand out about $165 million on March 15 because of legally binding contracts, according to a person briefed on the matter.
  
  Public anger has been stoked by revelations of bonuses paid by firms at the center of the financial-market meltdown that has plunged the U.S. into what may become the deepest recession since World War II. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating $3.6 billion in bonuses paid by Merrill Lynch & Co. shortly before it was acquired Jan. 1 by Bank of America Corp.
  
  “There are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last 18 months, but what’s happened at AIG is the most outrageous,” Summers said today on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
  
  Safeguarding Taxpayer
  
  Summers said the Obama administration’s priority is safeguarding the U.S. taxpayer. “No one cares about the shareholders of AIG. No one feels the slightest obligation to people who led us into these difficulties.”
  
  Even so, the administration can’t abrogate existing contractual obligations without shaking confidence in the legal system, Summers said.
  
  “The easy thing would be to just say, you know, ‘Off with their heads,’ and violate the contracts,” he said. “But you have to think about the consequences of breaking contracts for the overall system of law.”
  
  Frank said that starting when the Federal Reserve initiated the AIG rescue last September there should have been stricter rules on executive compensation and clearer guidelines for major financial institutions getting a government bailout.
  
  “Clearly there was a mistake at the beginning,” Frank said on Fox. “These people who were receiving this should have been given much stricter rules at the beginning.”
  
  ‘Abusing System’
  
  AIG is “abusing the system,” said Frank. “Any bank that thinks we’re being too tough on compensation, or trying to get foreclosures reduced, or stopping some of the lavish entertaining, they can give the money back.”
  
  “With AIG, I would just say we need to find out, one, are they legally recoverable,” Frank added. “But I do want to find out at what point these illegal obligations were incurred, who said, and at what point, we’re going to give these bonuses no matter what.”
  
  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” said the example of AIG might be followed by other companies lining up for government assistance.
  
  “The message here, I’m afraid, to any business out there that’s thinking about taking government money, is let’s enter into a bunch of contracts real quick, and we’ll have the taxpayers pay bonuses to our employees,” the Kentucky Republican said. “This is an outrage.”
  
  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was “really upset” by AIG’s plan to distribute the $165 million, Austan Goolsbee, a top White House economist, said on Fox. “You worry about that backlash” from the public, “but you’re also angry,” he said.
  
  ‘Not Sensible’
  
  “I don’t know why they would follow a policy that’s really not sensible, is obviously going to ignite the ire of millions of people,” Goolsbee said. “And we’ve done exactly what we can do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.”
  
  AIG Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy, who was recruited by the U.S. to run the insurer after the bailout, has vowed that the company will repay “every penny” to the U.S. of its bailout package by selling subsidiaries, and said the retention pay for talented people helps taxpayers by making the units attractive to buyers.