At a certain point, I just don’t get it.  The gravy train can’t keep rolling along forever.  Handing out massive bonuses to keep substandard talent on tap doesn’t seem like its going to benefit the firms in the long run or even pad their bottom lines in the short run.  You’ve got 100 year old industries that are basically being gutted by management for an end of year payout.  Call me crazy, but this looks like the rats are fleeing the ship.  Why should we keep funneling money into a set of companies that - according to their current business practices - aren’t even making a token effort to stay afloat?

The banks are going to get nationalized sooner or later at this rate, simply because the management has no interest in staying in business anymore.  We need a financial system in the same way that we need a power grid and a transportation infrastructure.  Banks can’t just “go away”.  But the management is just so incredibly piss poor that the system is just going to tank out sooner or later.  The only solution at that point is for the government to step in and fill up the gaps.

With each new story chronicling the asshole-ish behavior of Wall Street execs I think I’ve finally reached outrage fatigue, and then the next one comes along and I find I still have more capacity in which to fit further outrage. I’m at the point now where I think all of the personal assets of these dbags should be liquidated to pay the taxpayers back. Once they’re all completely out of assets and facing homelessness they can go compete for jobs at Wal Mart. Or maybe we could just boil them in oil.

Retention?  They are worried about retention?  Like the merger isn’t going to make retention LESS important?  Like, these guys could just go find a job somewhere else in this economy?

Spare me.

Have banking execs entered “the Tyson zone,” where by nothing they can do is really shocking anymore?  Next we’ll be hearing they prefer the suede in their trench coats to be tanned using the tears of homeless vets freshly squeezed by interns only allowed to clothe themselves in NYT classified pages.

You know, if they took the money for those bonuses and gave it to the businesses they invest in and told them to spread it among the employees, they probably wouldn’t be in that mess in the first place.

But no, rewarding those on the bottom levels is wrong. You can keep the proles happy by allowing them to wear jeans on friday or buying them a pizza. That’s their theory. That they don’t eat their own dogfood is hardly surprising.

Well, obviously, the job market for financial advisors is so much a sellers’ market that hefty “awards” are necessary for these companies to retain their valuable human capital . . .

Micheal Moore has the subject of his next movie and like Sicko is calling out for workers in the financial system to provide info.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=245

Git a rope….well, lots of ‘em.

“At a certain point, I just don’t get it.  The gravy train can’t keep rolling along forever. “

This is the kind of behavior you would find in a junkie or alcoholic or some other addict.  They aren’t looking past tomorrow.  The DSM is obviously missing an entire spectrum of mental disease heretofore either unrecognized or not taken seriously.

If they were bad drivers we’d take their keys away.  When they’re bad financial people (using all meanings of the word ‘bad’), why don’t we recognize the seriousness of the problem and take steps to protect society?

Better one banker living under a bridge than a hundred other innocents who lost their jobs because of the banker’s evil actions…

Git a rope….well, lots of ‘em.

Retention can be defined in a number of ways, ya know!

At a certain point, I just don’t get it.  The gravy train can’t keep rolling along forever.  Handing out massive bonuses to keep substandard talent on tap doesn’t seem like its going to benefit the firms in the long run or even pad their bottom lines in the short run.

They need the money for the civil suits that are going to be filed against them individually . . . or the ones that are pending now.  FINRA won’t let me post the link, but this is from the James P Gorman registration page for all his licenses, in the section where it talks about pending civil litigation.

Allegations:  FIVE PUTATIVE CLASS ACTIONS FILED BY PARTICIPANTS IN MORGAN STANLEY’S 401(K) AND EMPLOYEE STOCK OWNERSHIP PLAN HAVE BEEN CONSOLIDATED INTO A SINGLE ACTION AGAINST MORGAN STANLEY, MORGAN STANLEY & CO. INCORPORATED, AND VARIOUS INDIVIDUAL DEFENDANTS, INCLUDING JAMES GORMAN, ASSERTING CLAIMS FOR BREACH OF FIDUCIARY DUTIES UNDER EMPLOYEE RETIREMENT INCOME SECURITY ACT AND ALLEGING, AMONG OTHER THINGS, THAT THE RISKS OF OWNING MORGAN STANLEY STOCK WERE NOT ADEQUATELY DISCLOSED AND THAT MORGAN STANLEY STOCK WAS NOT A PRUDENT INVESTMENT.

Better one banker living under a bridge than a hundred other innocents who lost their jobs because of the banker’s evil actions…

If you’re living under a bridge on $500k / year, it better be a really nice bridge.

“It is not a bonus. It is an award.”

This guy must be related to my company’s CEO, who kept referring last week to our companywide pay cuts as “salary adjustments.”

Zifnab, obviously I consider $500k / year to be generous. 

Nobody is born deserving Paris Hilton’s lifestyle, not even Paris Hilton.  A bunch of scumbag bankers who’ve run the economy into the toilet should get the rope (as MAJeff says) and not a paycheck most of us could only dream of…

But taking away their bonuses is totally just like mugging them at gunpoint! Those poor deprived white men, whatever shall they do?

I suppose depending upon the kindness of strangers is out, huh?

but but but

They get those bonuses every year, so it’s like it’s really their salary and if you take it away, they’ll starve.

Or go somewhere else, b/c they’re salesguys, and salesguys are mercenaries.  They’ll sell anything.  Shoes.  Buckets.  Umbrellas.  So you have to pay them big money to carry the big numbers.

Fuck it.  When your company goes under, no one should get a bonus, especially not from tax money.  That’s all sorts of fucked up.

All the leaders of any bailed out bank need to be fired and investigated for prosecution.  It should be a condition of a bailout.

If a salesguy wants to walk b/c he didn’t get his bonus/club/retention award/euphemism for unearned loot, let him.  Fucking LET. HIM.

Do you really need top of the line sales people at this point?  Or should the banks really be concentrating on examining their portfolios, adjusting and fixing what mortgage assets they can, and retooling?

I must be mistaken, but it seems people here are under the impression that these people’s jobs are to provide some sort of benefit to society, and not to pillage and plunder…

These companies are paper masks behind which people hide to pillage and plunder. The cash flows in, the guys behind the mask syphon it all out as ‘salary’, then when the cash flow stops and the paper mask starts accumulating massive debt, they crumble it up (declare bankruptcy) and cut up a new paper mask to hide behind. “Hey, it’s this paper mask owing you money, not me! Isn’t the limited liability corporation a grand invention?”

The model works *even better* if the state starts giving the paper masks some handouts so they stay afloat. The pillagers behind the mask just syphon it all out again, and oh! look! the paper mask is still hemorraging money, whatever will we do? Throw another few billions our way will ya?

Sigh. Is it ‘outrage fatigue’ when you’re just so upset and angry and sad and scared that you don’t know where to begin or what to type?

But taking away their bonuses is totally just like mugging them at gunpoint! Those poor deprived white men, whatever shall they do?

Which is why I never quite got the objection to nationalization.  Is a company worth $50 billion after teh crash?  Just buy the damn thing for $50 billion.  No need to give out $700 billion in loans when you can spend $700 billion on hard assets.  The only argument for saving the banks at all is that we need the financial infrastructure.  Nationalization seems like the cleanest, most efficient, most capitalist way of handling it.  If the nation is really worried about creeping socialism, then just attach a clause to the Nationalization Act that requires the companies be solid within ten years.  If we don’t have this thing licked by then, we’ll ask the Japanese where to go from here.

“It is not a bonus. It is an award.”

“It is not a bomb.  It is a device which is exploding” - Jacques le Blanc, French Ambassador, on why Muroroa had acquired a healthy glow.

The banks are going to get nationalized sooner or later at this rate, simply because the management has no interest in staying in business anymore.  We need a financial system in the same way that we need a power grid and a transportation infrastructure.  Banks can’t just “go away”.  But the management is just so incredibly piss poor that the system is just going to tank out sooner or later.  The only solution at that point is for the government to step in and fill up the gaps.

Unfortunately, the political economy of the US is so set against this ever happening that the government would have to fall first.  And the idea of a government - any government - having complete control over this sector scares the hell out of me.  Would you want, say, a Bush Administration determining who did or didn’t get a mortgage, or which State did or did not get bonds financed?

There needs to be a complete overhaul of the regulation and purposing of the sector, probably starting by overturning Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (translation - making it clear that corporations exist at the sufferance and for the purposes of the greater good of society).  This is also highly unlikely to happen.

Parallels between this and the sclerosis of the old Soviet system do spring to mind.

We don’t even have lemon capitalism any more, we have straight-up ski-mask-and-gun capitalism.

Zifnab:Because they’ll never volunteer to have their companies taken over by the federal government, and if you do it by force, that will probably wipe out a large portion of the financial sector.

Mind you, it probably NEEDS to be wiped out, and it’s going to happen eventually anyway, but still. Getting a politician to basically wipe out the retirement savings of most of the nation isn’t going to happen. Unless the people ask for it first…and even then its risky.

If a salesguy wants to walk b/c he didn’t get his bonus/club/retention award/euphemism for unearned loot, let him.  Fucking LET. HIM.

Probably the most outrageous thing about it is not one of those mofos is going anywhere.  Where are they going to go?  No company that can pay a six-figure salary is hiring right now.  Anyone in the financial industry is lucky to have a job at any salary.

Their salaries are completely out-of-whack.  For years CEOs and upper level wonks have made hundreds of times as much money as ‘normal’ folk.  They thought they deserved it.

In reality, they were sucking it away from the workers who earned it, shrinking the middle class through failure of salaries to keep pace with inflation.  That money should have been more evenly distributed.  A large middle class makes this country function best.

But they were greedy fucks.  They paid themselves outrageous amounts of money and convinced themselves they were worth it.  CEOs tranferred from company to company b/c being a “CEO” was more important than understanding how any specific business worked.

They worked this insane model until they broke the country.  They don’t understand it yet, but the reckoning is coming, and the old model of grossly inflated salaries for CEOs is over.  It’s done.

$500,000 seems like a pittance to these people.  Some day, they will see it as an appropriate salary—even a large one—as reinvesting in a business and paying employees decently comes back into vogue. 

But getting from here to there?  Will be very painful.  And many of these assholes should go to jail, just to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

You know what the “retention award” is at pretty much every other company in the country?

“Congratulations, you get to keep your job. Now go take up the slack.”

This tape will be interesting, because if the payments are listed as retention payments in Morgan Stanley’s next 10-K, that would be prima facie evidence of a felony by one or more members of management, starting with the CEO.

You know, the saving grace of all of this is that Michael Moore is going to find plenty of people to tell him what it is.  Why?  Colossal egotists like these wankers are simply incapable of living any sort of life or doing any sort of “work” without a legion of lesser persons to actually get everything done for them, that’s why.

Caren wins the thread.

Here’s what I don’t understand - these guys failed.  Why would the company want to ‘retain’ failures?  They say they need to pay high salaries to get the best people to work for them, and that makes sense.  But the best people aren’t working for them!  The people who failed in the first place should not get a ‘retention award’; they should get a kick in the ass to send them out the door.  Use the money to hire some real talent, not to keep on a bunch of people who have already proven themselves to be incompetent.

I always shake my head at folks complaining about the horrors of a half million salary cap. Poor folks are always being told to downsize, that their lives would be better if they didn’t have a *gasp* color tv, or that they should move to someplace with jobs if they don’t have one. These guys should suck it up. If they can’t afford to live on 500k, I blame only them!

How much of *our* money needs to be spent on ridiculous bonuses instead of actually fixing the mess before our government gets smart, cuts out the middle man, and hands the money directly to us?

I know that if someone handed me even $50,000 I would have my credit card debt paid off, half my student loans paid, and the rest invested in SECONDS.  I sure as hell wouldn’t be wasting it on mink coats and leather cup holders.

I think that there’s a myth of meritocracy going on, that these guys earning the 7+ figure salaries deserve it because running a company that large is so difficult that only a few people can do it; and anyone who would accept only $500K can’t be any good.  (Never mind that many of the multi-millionare CEOs have shown themselves to be no good at running the companies they work for).

Really, it’s an old-boys network.  These folks are only willing to hire from their in-group, and that jacks up the salaries - not only in a strict supply/demand sense, but because these boards of directors and CEOs are willing to scratch each others’ backs at the expense of shareholders, who tend to be too diffuse a group to effectively stop it.