While I have no sympathy for financiers, being of the opinion that the financial system is inherently corrupt, I do think that Booman and, for that matter, President Obama have a valid point when it comes to the silliness (and danger) of demonizing them over the bonuses. Allow me to demonstrate the scales involved.
Firstly, cut me a little slack if I’m off by a few million (or billion); as I’ll demonstrate, the difference in orders of magnitude between the bailout and the bonuses renders such errors trivial.
Let’s say that you are a reasonably tall guy like me and have a three-foot stride. Let’s also say that you get a million dollars for each stride you take.
To earn the $165 million in bonuses, you have to walk 495 feet, which is just a bit more than a football field and a half.
To earn the $170 billion of the total bailout — and remember, a billion is a thousand millions — you would have to walk a bit over 88 miles.
The moral, of course, is that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to make a mountain out of a molehill when the molehill is just a pimple on the side of a real mountain.