Caligula has a new home on Wall Street
So, while the entire “financial industry” implodes, the leaders fiddle away at their golden violins. People are suffering on Wall Street:
Bonuses fell to $18.4 billion from $32.9 billion in 2007, the largest decline ever and the biggest percentage drop in more than 30 years, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said. The size of the bonus pool is the sixth-largest on record, he said.
So they must have done pretty well this year, right?
Losses from traditional broker-dealer operations of New York Stock Exchange member firms topped $35 billion in 2008, more than triple the record set a year earlier, Mr. DiNapoli said.
So, you lost $35 billion dollars, and have your hand in the tax-payer’s pockets, but yet you can find $18.4 billion to pay bonuses? My company turned a record year in revenue and profit and cut bonuses that were never that big to begin with.
They sure must employ a lot of people, right?
Meanwhile, Wall Street shed 19,200 jobs, or 10.2 percent, in New York City over the last 14 months, ending the year with 168,600 workers.
Let’s see, that comes out to an average bonus of $109,523.81. How did you do this year?
Now they’ll “defend” this orgyistic excess by promulgating the total fabrication that they have to do it to keep the talent. My question is: is this the same talent that lost $35 billion? Sounds like you should fire them, not give them rewards. I could have lost that kind of money for far less salary.
Wall Street is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with this country: a bastion of insular, self-serving egotists who do absolutely nothing useful for the country and enrich themselves while destroying the rest of society in the process.
Wall Street should be “up against the wall”. How they sleep… how they are allowed to sleep is beyond me.
This entry was posted at 3:18 pm on 28 January 2009 and is filed under Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
Next time around, I’d like to see you bash people who’ve just been through a once-in-a-century earthquake, accusing them of negligent building since obviously they did not build their houses strong enough. You could have built those houses shabbily for much less salary. And to top it off, the people whose houses collapsed are getting government assistance, as if to reward them for the shabbily built houses.
The anger you spew leads to no solution whatsoever, it only suggests mindless lynching and rage. Chimpanzees can do that.
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I particularly liked when companies like AIG pulled out the retention bonuses – maybe finance is different from programming but … I just can’t picture there being many tempting job opportunities for someone whose resume ends with “Help create the largest financial disaster in US history through reckless negligence”.