Financial industry insiders are grousing about a big downturn in annual bonuses. They should be thanking the rest of us — bombshell new research shows — for their continuing awesome good tidings.
Wall Streeters made fortunes, the new official report on America’s 2008 economic meltdown charges, defrauding the American public. They’re still making fortunes — and this official report is already sinking out of sight.
The latest figures on Wall Street bonus compensation reveal a recovery that starts — and stops — at America’s economic summit.
A relative handful of Americans, a key congressional panel forecasts, will take home more this year than half the nation’s taxpayers combined.
Would a stiff tax on banker bonuses blunt Wall Street profiteering — or let the vast majority of America’s wealthy off the hook?
The White House pay czar isn’t reforming Wall Street. He’s cutting deals with it. We need to understand the difference.
All the big banks in the Netherlands, pressed on by the Dutch finance minister, have agreed on a serious plan to restrain banker bonuses. And now the Dutch want the rest of the world to sign on.
Remember that $500,000 pay cap for bailed-out banking executives the White House announced back in February? Under Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s new rules for bailout pay, that maximum has become a minimum.
The awesomely affluent of high finance, if current trends continue, seem almost certain to survive the mess they’ve created — with their wealth and power largely intact. And Treasury and Congress don’t appear to really mind.
Lawmakers in the House, with their vote to tax bailout bonuses at 90 percent, have taken a
first step to real tax progressivity. But America’s rich, amid the AIG uproar, are still enjoying bargain-basement tax rates.