ABC News reports:
In 2007, Wall Street’s five biggest firms– Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley – paid a record $39 billion in bonuses to themselves.
That’s $10 billion more than the $29 billion loan taxpayers are making to J.P. Morgan to save Bear Stearns.
Those 2007 bonuses were paid even though the shareholders in those firms last year collectively lost about $74 billion in stock declines –their worst year since 2002.
Bear Stearns was bailed out, Lehman Brothers went broke, Merrill Lynch was bought up by Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley received an emergency waiver from the Federal Reserve last night to become bank holding companies in a desperate attempt to obtain credit. The loan guarantees the Federal Government extended to J.P. Morgan could be entirely repaid by simply confiscating the 2007 bonus checks of the employees of the five biggest financial services firms in the country (or, what’s left of them).
You have to wonder if the landscape is not ripe for a new form of genuine populism. I’ll admit, it would require quite a transformation in the thinking of the Democratic Party’s elected officials. But with zero percent of the general public feeling that the economy is improving, anything can happen. Right?
