Banks Paid $1.6 Billion in Excessive Bonuses, U.S. Finds

[waggy]

So now the government is paying people my money to tell other people that they paid themselves too much of the money that the government took from me and gave to them. *head explodes*

well its keeping people in work eh?...

 

[SammyJr]

As a shareholder in Wells Fargo you obviously love taking it on the chin OP.

I love how calling out crooked banksters is somehow class warfare, as if corporate subsidies and the ability to fuck other people to make money are somehow sacred American values which should never be questioned or frowned upon in any way.

The Free Trade religion represents the new American values. Bailouts for the wealthy and offshoring for everyone else. Praise be.

 

[spidey07]

I love the little tidbit buried in the article. Most of those companies have fully repaid TARP so they can say "FUCK YOU FEINBERG!"

What the hell is wrong with our nation when we have a "pay czar"?

 

[nobodyknows]

Should have lets those crooks sink and your shareholder value with them. Free market that y'all espouse can not function when you let deadbeats run the show. Expect more of the same. aka moral hazard, even bigger to fail now.

I had mixed feeling about it but supported the bailout. The farther we get from the crisis the more I wonder if the bailout was the right thing to do.

 

[CycloWizard]

well its keeping people in work eh?...

Really? *taps sarcasm meter* My wife, who has a PhD in chemical engineering and two years of post-doctoral experience, is getting rejected from substitute teaching jobs. I have the same qualifications and only have a job because I saw this mess coming and took a job with the federal government where it was safe and where bonuses are still allowed and handed out regularly. Only within the structure of government am I safe from government oversight. Could I be posting on here in the middle of the day every day if I had a job in the private sector?

 

[waggy]

Really? *taps sarcasm meter* My wife, who has a PhD in chemical engineering and two years of post-doctoral experience, is getting rejected from substitute teaching jobs. I have the same qualifications and only have a job because I saw this mess coming and took a job with the federal government where it was safe and where bonuses are still allowed and handed out regularly. Only within the structure of government am I safe from government oversight. Could I be posting on here in the middle of the day every day if I had a job in the private sector?

there really needs to be a sarcasm tag...lol

but sad part is what i said is well true.

 

[SammyJr]

I love the little tidbit buried in the article. Most of those companies have fully repaid TARP so they can say "FUCK YOU FEINBERG!"

What the hell is wrong with our nation when we have a "pay czar"?

What the hell is wrong with our nation when the Lobbyists run the nation?

 

[waggy]

What the hell is wrong with our nation when the Lobbyists run the nation?

check mate and win.

 

[spidey07]

What the hell is wrong with our nation when the Lobbyists run the nation?

The lobbyist indirectly represent the citizens. The Constitution guarantees us access to congress. You got a problem with petitioning congress?

How's Hussein's promise of no more lobbist working out for ya?

 

[bamacre]

Nope, Rand would have supported another super wealthy banker swooping in and buying all the banks for pennies on the dollar, letting everyone with a bad mortgage go through foreclosure, and would have supported banks hoarding money. She was a big fan of Hoovervilles, IIRC.

I think you aught to do a little more research on Rand and her thoughts on banking before you bring her into some rhetoric about banking.

 

[bamacre]

I had mixed feeling about it but supported the bailout. The farther we get from the crisis the more I wonder if the bailout was the right thing to do.

Everyone knows the bailouts were a boon for the world.

 

[sandorski]

The lobbyist indirectly represent the citizens. The Constitution guarantees us access to congress. You got a problem with petitioning congress?

How's Hussein's promise of no more lobbist working out for ya?

fail

 

[waggy]

The lobbyist indirectly represent the citizens. The Constitution guarantees us access to congress. You got a problem with petitioning congress?

How's Hussein's promise of no more lobbist working out for ya?

if you really think that then you are a bigger fool then people think. the lobbyist do not represent the citizens they don't give a fuck about them.

i do agree with the 2nd part. but then again anyone who took Obama at his word is a fool. thats nothing against the dems. its against politicans.

 

[BoberFett]

Only within the structure of government am I safe from government oversight.

That's a frighteningly realistic statement.

 

[brencat]

Everyone knows the bailouts were a boon for the world.

Classic. Love the response and the sig.

 

[Patranus]

The lobbyist indirectly represent the citizens. The Constitution guarantees us access to congress. You got a problem with petitioning congress?

How's Hussein's promise of no more lobbist working out for ya?

Yup, people are bitching because they are too lazy, hell, its the American way.

if you really think that then you are a bigger fool then people think. the lobbyist do not represent the citizens they don't give a fuck about them.

Sure they do.
A lobbyist represents a company that consumers buy products/goods from. The lobbyist is looking out for that company. By lobbying that company is able to provide a better product/service to those people at a lower cost/more availability/ect. The lobbyist is lobbying for the consumers that utilize that companies services. If people do not support that companies operations they are free to take their business elsewhere and the problem will fix itself.

 

[spidey07]

Yup, people are bitching because they are too lazy, hell, its the American way.

I donate to a few select PACs so that my views are represented and presented to congressmen via lobbying. Believe it or not, the lobbyist do represent a group of people with common interests. Lobbyist don't just exist for the "evil corporations being all corporationy" but a huge number of issues and interests.

-edit-
Also found this handy, overwhelmingly the majority of PACs/lobbying is for Democrats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee

 

[bfdd]

Another black and white argument from a follower of the Free Trade religion. Do you miss feudalism, by chance?

How about we fix our Democracy so the Government represents all Americans? A strong Democratic Government is the only power the regular people have against great wealth and power.

no, no democracy in the united states. you and everyone who preach democracy need to shut the fuck up with it. we are a goddamn republic and we were setup as a republic for a reason. learn the goddamn fucking terms and stop bastardizing the words. thomas jefferson would of punched you in the face for that post.

 

[bfdd]

The Free Trade religion represents the new American values. Bailouts for the wealthy and offshoring for everyone else. Praise be.

there is nothing free trade about bailouts. god you're fucking stupid and more so annoying.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I will just post this thread :

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2047959&highlight=greece+implode&page=9#217

And a link to this article :

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/12697/64796

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.

It continues with summing up and describing all bubbles since the 1920.

Now ask yourself, who provide the money for these investor firms at the beginning.
Because i ask myself, with such bonuses it must be the case the bank is the investor with capital all in one. The bank and the investor are the same.
Or not ? Who is the investor ? Because if bonuses of these amounts are paid, then how much money is going back to the investor as profit ?

 

[CycloWizard]

That's a frighteningly realistic statement.

I planned the last two years around it and I still can't believe it. After I literally left the country for five weeks out of the first eleven, I got a performance bonus in the mail. Any private company would have mailed me a pink slip. I watched every game of the World Cup live (except for the last games of the first round, of course, when two games were being played simultaneously, but I DVR'd those and watched them also during business hours). I was rewarded with a promotion. Meanwhile, people who work their asses off are simply scraping by. I abhor the system we have now and therefore make every effort to show why it is absolutely evil.

 

[ciba]

By taxpayer-funded bank bailout, do you mean, "bailout the Treasury expects to turn a profit off?"

The only way to count TARP as a loss to Treasury is to include the non-banks (AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GM, and Chrysler).

 

[Hacp]

I planned the last two years around it and I still can't believe it. After I literally left the country for five weeks out of the first eleven, I got a performance bonus in the mail. Any private company would have mailed me a pink slip. I watched every game of the World Cup live (except for the last games of the first round, of course, when two games were being played simultaneously, but I DVR'd those and watched them also during business hours). I was rewarded with a promotion. Meanwhile, people who work their asses off are simply scraping by. I abhor the system we have now and therefore make every effort to show why it is absolutely evil.

World Cup? What decent American watches the world cup?