Word: bonuses
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...reaction to the bonus issue is that Congress is in the midst of passing a bill to tax the payouts at a 90% rate, punishing people for taking money that they appeared to be entitled to and doing nothing to the management that agreed to the deals in the first place. The tax will not be the end of the blow-up. Indignation makes good theater for politicians and makes some of their more naive constituents think that their elected officials are looking after their best interests...
...Citi finalized its bonus program shortly before the new rules were introduced. That might make the payments permissible, though they could be made almost worthless by new tax rules just passed by the House of Representatives and headed for consideration in the Senate. Even so, Citigroup's move in January to set in place bonus payments for years to come raises questions about whether it was trying to evade compensation rules it knew were coming...
...executive legitimately earns a bonus, then paying it out over a number of years makes a lot of sense,' says Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate at the Corporate Library, which examines issues of corporate governance. "But I find it hard to believe that any top executive at a bailed-out bank would have had the performance in 2008 to generate a multimillion-dollar bonus." (Read "Is Citibank Really Out of the Woods...
...many declarations of fury was to roll my eyes and mutter something about this being a trivial distraction from the Important Things we need to be dealing with. (I suspect that similar sentiments on the part of Geithner and Summers largely explain their politically tone-deaf handling of the bonus affair.) (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...bonuses were retention payments promised early last year, when it was clear that London-based AIG FP was in trouble but not yet apparent that its parent company wouldn't survive without $170 billion (and counting) in taxpayer aid. Without that aid, AIG would have gone bankrupt in September and the bonus promises would have been torn up. AIG was not allowed to go bankrupt because Lehman Brothers had just failed and the people at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve worried (with reason) that another failure - in particular, the failure of a firm that wrote default insurance...