excellent article on this topic:
Wall Street Bonuses
Why The $700 Billion Landgrab By Wall Street Won't Work, And Other Miscellanea
America is Wall Street's bitch. It's official.
Not that anyone should be surprised.
Let's face it, the same lying cheats who created the financial swindle of the century, via now worthless CDO and CMO products, who took out hundreds of billions of dollars in profits directly attributable to the creation of these instruments (a large number of which are likely worthless, as they are backed by non-existent mortgages or the same mortgages re-used countless times), created a crisis of their own devising (by shorting those same CDOs into the ground, thereby reducing the value of the collateral value, thus creating single handedly the "credit crisis"), after lobbying hard in 2004 to eliminate rules that barred the industry from eliminating reality-based loan loss reserves and levering up to dangerous levels, have put the pork to the nation's taxpayers yet again.
Never mind that the bailout plan isn't working. Credit markets are still locked up, because the recipients of the bailout aren't doing what they are supposed to with the money - lending it out. No, instead, they are holding on to it, which is sort of the same as saying the plan never would have worked given the character of those involved. But what are they doing with all the taxpayer money they are holding onto?
See below from the UK's Guardian:
Wall Street banks in $70bn staff payout
Pay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of US government bail-out package
* Morgan Stanley $10.7bn
* Goldman Sachs $11.4bn,
* Morgan Stanley $10.73bn,
* JP Morgan $6.53bn
* Merrill Lynch $11.7bn.
Financial workers at Wall Street's top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.
Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government's cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2...laries-banking
Yes, you are reading this right. You were told by the ex-head of Goldman that this wasn't a theft of billions by the Wall Street bankers, no, rather, that this was a necessary stimulus package required to free-up the frozen credit markets. We were treated to countless articles from NY types about how we were all going to die if the bill wasn't passed. Our elected officials overrode the express will of the people, and approved the bill, even as our liar president drove home the canard that this, like most of his other "it's an emergency, do it now!" edicts, needed to happen or the world would end. You know, cause financial weapons of mass destruction were about to be used by, well, some faceless enemy, unless we shelled out $700 billion. We even got to read about how this whole mess was really Main Street's fault, not Wall Street's, and how Main Street would lose unless the bankers got most of Main Street's remaining savings to lubricate the markets. Tisk tisk, the money needed to be approved IMMEDIATELY!!!!!
And now we, in a non-US paper, of course, discover what is actually going on. Our money goes, exactly as suspected, to the same Wall Street bankers who screwed us on the whole deal in the first place.
My disgust knows no bounds, even as I have zero surprise. It's just amusing to me how quickly they moved, and how brazen the grab is. Anyone who believed this wasn't what it appeared to be, the last theft by our administration's rich white friends, can now digest the above, as well as the articles describing how the banks aren't lending the money they just got for the express purpose of lending.