Word: risking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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More important, at least when it comes to the bailed-out businesses, the notion that there's a correlation between excessive pay and excessive risk-taking isn't quite accurate. It may be true in the case of hedge funds or leveraged-buyout - which call themselves private-equity (PE) - firms or some parts of stricken outfits like AIG, Citi and the former Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America. But hedgies and PEs aren't covered by pay czar Ken Feinberg's ukases...
...different story at intelligently run companies like Goldman. They make money by understanding risk and managing it. If the firm as a whole doesn't make money, the traders and risk takers don't either...
...stock-loan department, AIG's other disaster, took the cash it got for lending out stock owned by AIG and invested the money in esoteric securities rather than in risk-free Treasuries, the standard practice. The idea was - I'm not kidding - to make an extra one-fifth of 1% in interest. When the esoterica, which the stock-loan folks thought was riskless, crumbled, so did the firm. (See the worst business deals...
...after the firm went bankrupt. (He still took home, before taxes, $490 million from his stock-based compensation, so don't cry for him.) James Cayne, CEO of the defunct Bear Stearns, was in a similar situation. If Fuld and Cayne had known their firms were as badly at risk as they proved to be, don't you think they'd have sold as much stock as they could before their firms imploded...
...lend and to keep commerce flowing. Cheap money is nice for lenders and borrowers - but it's devastating for savers, especially for retirees who use interest income to supplement Social Security. If you had $500,000 stashed away - not a bad nest egg - you could earn a no-risk $20,000 to $25,000 annually (before taxes) two years ago buying bank CDs or short-term Treasury securities. Now you earn less than $5,000 in an average one-year CD, about $2,000 in a one-year Treasury. This offers retirees unpleasant choices: reduce their standard of living...