Word: bonus
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With Goldman Sachs employees on track for their best bonus year ever, the investment bank's executives have been making the case that their bounty is good for all of us. "We contribute to growth," CEO Lloyd Blankfein said at a breakfast put on by FORTUNE. "Once the economy starts to turn, we get very involved." In a discussion about morality and markets at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, Goldman Sachs International vice chairman Brian Griffiths, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, described giant paychecks for bankers as an economic necessity. "We have to tolerate the inequality...
...real world (outside New York City), a bonus is generally a payment for extraordinarily good performance. But on Wall Street, what's called a bonus is generally part of base pay. That's especially true for worker bees, who far outnumber CEOs. (The word bonus is a remnant from the days when Wall Street was made up of partnerships. Now that Wall Street's largely owned by public shareholders, it should have long since dropped bonus for contingent compensation or something similar. But hey, the Street, as I said, is tone-deaf.)(See the top 10 financial-crisis buzzwords...
Paying a $25 million or $30 million bonus to a Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase or Morgan Stanley higher-up this year is obscene because none of these firms would exist if our government and others hadn't stepped in to save the world financial system. If these companies have all that money around, largely courtesy of us, they ought to send it to the U.S. Treasury. But paying a $250,000 bonus on top of a $150,000 salary to a worker bee is a different story...
Then there are the blinders. Goldman Sachs, everyone's favorite piñata these days, explains that its bonus pool is so high because it sets aside half its profits for compensation (which includes salaries and benefits as well as bonuses.) Other firms have similar formulas. Well, excuse me. This isn't a normal time or a normal year. Just because you've done something in the past doesn't mean you have...
...reminiscent of Pavement’s 1992 epic “Fillmore Jive,” but it has none of that song’s musical variety or piercing lyrical attack. Jokes that fall flat include “Stolen Pills” and, above all, the bonus track, which features an elderly British woman essentially doing a send-up of a Judi Dench accent while introducing the album. Yet these clunkers are more than compensated for by the album’s highlights: “Cold Change” and “Mighty Mighty Fall?...