Winners'N Losers
by digby
Unemployment may the highest its been in a generation, but at least we don't have to lose any more sleep about the plight of the really important people:
Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year -- a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street's pay culture.
What is this regulatory scrutiny they speak of?
Congressional lawmakers today expressed concern that another AIG bonus fiasco could soon unfold, on the heels of a new watchdog report criticizing the Treasury Department for failing to oversee pay plans at AIG before the bailed-out company dished out $168 million in retention payments in March.
"It was a failure of oversight by Treasury" that led to the spring's bonus fiasco, watchdog Neil Barofsky told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee this morning, a failure for which he said Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was ultimately responsible.
Treasury essentially abdicated its oversight duties of AIG's compensation structures to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which was "a recipe for disastrous consequences," said Barofsky, the special inspector general for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
I realize that 2009 has been a banner year on Wall Street and all, and everyone's very excited that the market closed above 10,000 today. But let's not forget that the rest of America is still mired in a horrible sluggish economy, with housing still as moribund as ever and unemployment still rising. Considering the fact that it was the greed of the financial industry that was the proximate cause of this recession, common decency would have them putting their triumphal return to master of the unhiverse status on hold for just a while longer.
By the way, the more this happens without a response from the Democratic majority in Washington, the more they will be blamed for perpetuating this crisis. Saying that everything would have been a lot worse without the stimulus and then letting these greedy jackasses crow and gloat and resume the pillaging isn't going to go over well among the electorate unless this economy turns around very sharply.
Wall Street knows very well that nothing will happen to them if they start handing out bonuses like Halloween candy. And the good news is that everyone will blame big government and its onerous taxes and regulations for letting it happen. Talk about a win-win.
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