Word: walls
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...Blame? While it feels great to be outraged by these fat bonuses and whack the pigs by restricting - or seeming to restrict - the pay at outfits that have taken government bailout money, it's a bit pointless too. Because to some extent, Wall Street's pay and its problems really are misunderstood. (Stop snickering! It's true.) Even though "Wall Street" means the nation's big financial and investing operations, not a geographical location, a disproportionate number of Street people live in Manhattan. Things in the desirable parts of that borough are expensive beyond belief, especially if you have children...
Without a doubt, the financial meltdown and its ensuing horrors began on Wall Street. However, Main Street is not a totally innocent lamb in all this. Yes, the greedheads tempted us with mortgages and other products we couldn't afford. But you could have said no, as many of us did. And you could have tried to live within your means or, better yet, below them, instead of falling prey to financial fantasies...
...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...
...pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers...
...forget, too, that a fair number of Wall Streeters got wiped out because their wealth was tied to their firm's stock price. Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman, had shares and options worth about $1 billion at their peak. He got less than $1 million when he sold them 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...