Ward on Words

Jon Stewart's take on the absence of three CEOs from an important meeting with the President of the United States... The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Flight Delay www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis Apparently, phoning it in was the best way for these top-notch bankers, mired in fog, to touch base with Obama... It's a bitch when weather gets in the way of a personal meeting with the president.

...for all 30 members of its management team. Nice press release includes few pertinent details. Would love to know if this means the 30,000+ employees not affected by this plan now get bigger bonuses. After all, Goldman's $17 billion bonus stash needs to be distributed to the many thousands of deserving employees, right? In the press release, Lloyd Blankfein offers up this quotable nugget: "The measures that we are announcing today reflect the compensation principles that we articulated at our shareholders' meeting in May. We believe our compensation policies are the strongest in our industry and ensure that compensation accurately reflects the firm's performance and incentivizes behavior that is in the public’s and our shareholders’ best interests. "In addition, by subjecting our compensation principles and executive compensation to a shareholder advisory vote, we are further strengthening our dialogue with shareholders on the important issue of compe...

In a year that has seen unemployment spike to its highest levels in decades and government debt reach record levels, Goldman Sachs is on track to pay out its highest employee bonuses ever in the firm's history. All part of "God's work," Lloyd Blankfein suggested in a recent interview with the London Times. Here's the intro from that story: "Number 85 Broad Street, a dull, rust-coloured office block in lower Manhattan, doesn’t look like a place to stop and stare, and that’s just the way the people who work there like it. The men and women who arrive in the watery dawn sunshine, dressed in Wall Street black, clutching black briefcases and BlackBerrys, are very, very private. They walk quickly from their black Lincoln town cars to the lobby, past, well, nothing, really. There’s no name plate on the building, no sign on the front desk and the armed policeman stationed outside isn’t saying who works there. There’s a good reason for the secrecy. Number 85 ...

In the year since the crash, Goldman Sachs has been very busy, as you would expect of the financial giant. The company has paid back its TARP loan (with interest!) and, after some haggling , paid the full amount the fed wanted for its warrants (good citizenship!) And it's been very clear that it never needed the $12 bil that it got from AIG via the feds. Apparently, according to Gary Cohn, Goldman president, Goldman didn't need any of the extraordinary financial interventions it received in the last year. He's quoted in a NY Times story last August: "'We did not have a near-death experience,' said Gary D. Cohn, Goldman’s president. The government saved the financial industry as a whole, but it did not save Goldman Sachs, he said." And Goldman has also stated publicly that it has not changed the way it does business, and in fact, has profited hugely by the current business climate , the climate that seems quite chilly and foreboding to so man...

This story about the hurdles catching the heels of anyone interested in reining in Wall Street pay had me thinking about compensation. According to that story in yesterday's NY Times, Wall Street has not long endured life without the reward of the "guaranteed bonus." (In fact, I doubt it's endured even a second without such a perk.) Though unemployment has grown exponentially in the last year, though the recovery is looking to be a "jobless" one for those outside of Wall Street, the investment bankers who've been propped up and well-fed at the trough of TARP are planning a lot of "ironclad, multimillion-dollar payouts – guaranteed no matter how an employee performs." Guaranteed no matter how the economy performs. And, as we saw last winter, guaranteed by the feds no matter how the company performs. And when I was thinking about compensation, I starting thinking about something a very wise man said not too long ago about Wall Stree...