US plans big pay cuts at US bailout firms

[Hazcat]

AP source: Administration to order big pay cuts for top US executives at bailout companies

    * By Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer
    * On 3:36 pm EDT, Wednesday October 21, 2009

   
    *    Companies:
          o Bank Of America Corporation
          o Citigroup, Inc.
          o Motors Liquidation Company

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration plans to order companies that received huge U.S. government bailouts last year to sharply cut the compensation of their highest paid executives.

A person familiar with the decision, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it has not been announced, says the seven companies that received the most assistance will have to cut the annual salaries of their 25 highest-paid executives by an average of about 90 percent from last year.

This person says the Treasury Department will announce the deep pay cuts within the next few days.

The seven companies are: Bank of America Corp., American International Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., General Motors, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/US-plans-big-pay-cuts-at-US-apf-22499205.html?x=0&.v=1

[Hazcat]

More in-depth here

http://www.cnbc.com/id/33417281

[Pathfinder]

Welcome to the People's Republic of the United States of America.

CNBC's own poll says 72% of the respondents do not think benefit caps by the gummint are appropriate.

Notice any particular company not mentioned in either article? Try Goldman Sachs - the firm that most of bho's financial minions came from, and quite possibly the one most responsible for the destruction of Bear Stearns and Lehman.

Read this - early in the day so you won't lose sleep over the fraud and outright theft being done on Wall Street. I'm not a big Rolling Stone fan, but I cannot refute anything this writer says, except his still prevalent lust for bho.

The person (single individual) who did the most damage to Bear spent $2 million to orchestrate the downfall - and walked away with $270 million in profit - and cannot even be identified!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle/1

[tombogan03884]

 I don't fault the Financial companies for being greedy . It is the nature of the beast, it is the whole purpose of the industry.
What I DO fault is the Congress interfering . Companies should have been allowed to FAIL. Back when this was America the CEO would have jumped out of windows. Unfortunately "honor" is a dead concept in this current Socialist Republic and these CEO's go on to hold Cabinet positions. Any one who does not pitch an absolute sh!t fit over this continued Govt. interference should have their Citizenship revoked. And any Congress member who supports it should be killed and there body dumped across the border.

[Pathfinder]

I don't fault the Financial companies for being greedy . It is the nature of the beast, it is the whole purpose of the industry.
What I DO fault is the Congress interfering . Companies should have been allowed to FAIL. Back when this was America the CEO would have jumped out of windows. Unfortunately "honor" is a dead concept in this current Socialist Republic and these CEO's go on to hold Cabinet positions. Any one who does not pitch an absolute sh!t fit over this continued Govt. interference should have their Citizenship revoked. And any Congress member who supports it should be killed and there body dumped across the border.

Tom, read the RS article I linked. If it's true, it was not a fail due to incompetence or "bad economy" or over-stretching the company's resources. This was a murder, pure and simple. Here are the money quotes from the article:

"That this particular scam played such a prominent role in the demise of the two firms was supremely ironic. After all, the boom that had ballooned both companies to fantastic heights was basically a counterfeit economy, a mountain of paste that Wall Street had built to replace the legitimate business it no longer had. By the middle of the Bush years, the great investment banks like Bear and Lehman no longer made their money financing real businesses and creating jobs. Instead, Wall Street now serves, in the words of one former investment executive, as "Lucy to America's Charlie Brown," endlessly creating new products to lure the great herd of unwitting investors into whatever tawdry greed-bubble is being spun at the moment: Come kick the football again, only this time we'll call it the Internet, real estate, oil futures. Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.

What really happened to Bear and Lehman is that an economic drought temporarily left the hyenas without any more middle-class victims — and so they started eating each other, using the exact same schemes they had been using for years to fleece the rest of the country. And in the forensic footprint left by those kills, we can see for the first time exactly how the scam worked — and how completely even the government regulators who are supposed to protect us have given up trying to stop it.

This was a brokered bloodletting, one in which the power of the state was used to help effect a monstrous consolidation of financial and political power. Heading into 2008, there were five major investment banks in the United States: Bear, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Today only Morgan Stanley and Goldman survive as independent firms, perched atop a restructured Wall Street hierarchy. And while the rest of the civilized world responded to last year's catastrophes with sweeping measures to rein in the corruption in their financial sectors, the United States invited the wolves into the government, with the popular new president, Barack Obama — elected amid promises to clean up the mess — filling his administration with Bear's and Lehman's conquerors, bestowing his papal blessing on a new era of robbery."

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