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Happy Times Are Here Again

By catdynamics on October 20, 2008.

US banks setting aside $70 billion for year end bonuses.
We conclude Bank of America is overgenerous and JP Morgan are cheap bastards.

from Grauniad:

"...Citigroup, [...], accrued $25.9bn for salaries and bonuses, an increase on the previous year of 4%. Earlier this week the bank accepted a $25bn investment by the US government as part of its bail-out plan.

At Goldman Sachs the figure was $11.4bn, Morgan Stanley $10.73bn, JP Morgan $6.53bn and Merrill Lynch $11.7bn."

It was just a week ago that we got the following:


Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were told they would each get $25 billion; Bank of America and Wells Fargo, $20 billion each (plus an additional $5 billion for their recent acquisitions); Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, $10 billion each, with Bank of New York Mellon and State Street each receiving $2 to 3 billion. Wells Fargo will get $5 billion for its acquisition of Wachovia, and Bank of America the same for amount for its purchase of Merrill Lynch.

JP Morgan is only giving a 1/4 of its bailout dollars in bonuses. Everyone else is giving out pretty much all of them. Cheap bastards.

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'k, I'm not an american, so I'm not that up to date on your financial crisis. What exactly are you trying to say here?

Are you pointing out that bankers have lots of money, and need none of the taxpayers' for the bailout? That they should be paying for the bailout? That they are corrupt fatcats?

The truth is worth getting to without waffling.

Something about the bailout money not getting down to the mortgagees who need it. They gave the banks all this money, and the bastards just paid themselves out with it. What a surprise.

Kevin (Rudd)'s idea is better - injecting the money into the bottom, and having it spent on christmas shopping. There's also that 1% rate cut.

These institutions are allegedly insolvent, not loaning and cutting dividends.
So they get a capital injection from the government, putting taxpayer money at risk, on very generous terms - and, voila, the christmas bonus is up - in four cases allegedly more or less exactly the capital injection they received is being paid out in bonuses.

The kindest word for this is that it is impolitic.