NationOfChange April 9 2014
Not too many years ago, any news story about bonus money would’ve been about some 20-year-old baseball player — an up-and-coming superstar getting $100,000 or so on top of his salary as an extra incentive to join the Yankees, Giants, Red Sox or whatever team. Sportswriters dubbed them: “Bonus Babies.”
How quaint. These days, stories about bonus money don’t elicit cheers, for they feature some of society’s least admirable people: Wall Street bankers. Far from superstars, they can be subpar performers or even what amounts to crime syndicate bosses overseeing everything from simple fraud to laundering money for drug cartels. Yet, in the first part of each year, we witness this cluster of greedmeisters quaffing champagne, laughing uproariously and shouting, “It’s bonus time, baby!”
This year, even though the Wall Street bosses have presided over a 30 percent drop in their banks’ profits, they’ve extracted a 15 percent raise in overall bonus money, totaling a ridiculous $27 billion. That averages out to $165,000 in extra pay to each Wall Street banker. But averages deceive, for thousands of lower-level bankers are given a dab, while those up in the executive suites make off with the bulk of the bonus heist.
Michael Corbat, CEO of Citigroup, for example, didn’t just grab a 15 percent increase in bonus pay, but nearly three times that. His total haul was $16 million. Then there’s Jamie Dimon, boss of JPMorgan Chase. He had a really terrible year in 2013, forcing his shareholders to shell out some $22 billion in penalties for tallying up a long list of illegalities. But that didn’t stop Jamie from taking a 74 percent hike in bonus money this year — he pulled in a cool $18.5 million.
In a time when the 90 percent majority of Americans see their income falling, you’d think Wall Street might show a bit of modesty.
But, instead, they choose to show us just how much Wall Street crime really does pay.
Let’s review the rap sheet of Wall Street banks: Defrauding investors, cheating homeowners, forgery, rigging markets, tax evasion, credit card ripoffs … and so sickeningly much more.
The alternate financial media has been abuzz of late with bizarre stories of the alleged suicides of prominent members of world banking and finance. Over recent weeks, between eight and twelve (some say as many as twenty) successful traders and managers involved with FOREX trading and other derivative currency speculation, have conveniently “decided” to throw themselves from the roof tops of a variety of JP Morgan Chase banks in London, Hong Kong, and New York. Another top banking official, William Broeksmit, former executive at Deutsche Bank, was found hanged in his London home.
Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It’s 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire’s biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy – a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we’ve seen in more than a century.