Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein gets $15m pay award

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12316309

Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs Group has tripled the base salary of chief executive Lloyd Blankfein to $2m (£1.3m), up from $600,000.

And company filings show he was also awarded shares currently worth $12.6m, a 42% hike from the the stock bonus he received for 2009.

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Banks were pressed to reduce bonuses in 2009 after the 2008 global economic collapse, largely blamed on bankers.

The financial system had been rescued by more than a trillion dollars of support from the US government, and there was public outrage from Main Street at the sums of money Wall Street bankers were being paid in salaries and bonuses.

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1. This may help explain things

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/

" The result of these divergent trends is a jaw-dropping surge in U.S. income inequality. According to the economists Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, between 2002 and 2007, 65 percent of all income growth in the United States went to the top 1 percent of the population. The financial crisis interrupted this trend temporarily, as incomes for the top 1 percent fell more than those of the rest of the population in 2008. But recent evidence suggests that, in the wake of the crisis, incomes at the summit are rebounding more quickly than those below. One example: after a down year in 2008, the top 25 hedge-fund managers were paid, on average, more than $1 billion each in 2009, quickly eclipsing the record they had set in pre-recession 2007."

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2. Looks like a good article, thank you for the link Lared. nt.

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3. Another gem

A Wall Street investor who is a passionate Democrat recounted to me his bitter exchange with a Democratic leader in Congress who is involved in the tax-reform effort. “Screw you,” he told the lawmaker. “Even if you change the legislation, the government won’t get a single penny more from me in taxes. I’ll put my money into my foundation and spend it on good causes. My money isn’t going to be wasted in your deficit sinkhole.”

He is not alone in his fury. In a much-quoted newsletter to investors last summer, the hedge-fund manager—and 2008 Obama fund-raiser—Dan Loeb fumed, “So long as our leaders tell us that we must trust them to regulate and redistribute our way back to prosperity, we will not break out of this economic quagmire.” Two other former Obama backers on Wall Street—both claim to have been on Rahm Emanuel’s speed-dial list—told me that the president is “anti-business”; one went so far as to worry that Obama is “a socialist.”

Much of this pique stems from simple self-interest: in addition to the proposed tax hikes, the financial reforms that Obama signed into law last summer have made regulations on American finance more stringent. But as the Democratic investor’s angry references to his philanthropic work suggest, the rage in the C-suites is driven not merely by greed but by a perceived affront to the plutocrats’ amour propre, a wounded incredulity that anyone could think of them as villains rather than heroes. Aren’t they, after all, the ones whose financial and technological innovations represent the future of the American economy? Aren’t they “doing God’s work”?

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4. Hedge fund boss John Paulson made $5 billion (yes, with a "b") last year

Probably the largest sum of money ever "earned" by a human in a single year even after adjusting for inflation.

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5. I saw that story yesterday.

Puketastic. I'm so glad those tax cuts for the rich are still in effect. :sarcasm:

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6. What's worse, his hedge fund earnings will be treated as capital gains and taxed @ 15%

The infamous "hedge-fund loophole".

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7. Whee!

I'm getting stabby. I'd better go back to the threads on Egypt before I burst a vein.