The U. S. economy is big. Actually it’s huge. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis last year the GDP was $14.6602 trillion ($14,660,200,000,000). For some people the economy has recovered nicely. Those people would be the Wall Street bankers who drove the economy over the cliff. According to the Wall Street Journal they did quite well last year.
In 2010, total compensation and benefits at publicly traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record of $135 billion, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. The total is up 5.7% from $128 billion in combined compensation and benefits by the same companies in 2009.
Doing a little math, if we take the $135 billion divided by the $14.6602 trillion we end up with an interesting ratio: 0.00920861. Let’s round it off to 0.0092. Change the decimal into a percent and it becomes 0.92% or almost 1%.
What’s the big deal with almost 1% you may be wondering. Remember where those numbers came from. That 1% means that the Wall Street bankers were given almost 1% of the entire U. S. economy as pay last year.
And you thought numbers were dull.
