In case you missed it, the Wall Street Journal published their annual review on executive pay. While we go without jobs, their bonuses and compensation just went through the stratosphere.
The 50 U.S. chief executives who laid off the most employees between November 2008 and April 2010 eliminated a total of 531,363 jobs, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group that works for social justice and against wealth concentration.
In “CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” the institute said the $598 million in combined pay for the 50 executives would have paid one month’s worth of average-sized unemployment benefits for each of the laid-off workers.
The top 50 layoff firms reported a 44 percent average profit increase for 2009, the report said.
“These numbers all reflect a broader trend in Great Recession-era Corporate America: the relentless squeezing of worker jobs, pay and benefits to boost corporate earnings and maintain corporate executive paychecks at their recent bloated levels,” the authors wrote.
Is that what it takes to be a corporate leader? The ability to screw anybody, anytime and put the money in their own pockets?
When else in history have we seen this? What happened when the people had enough?
The New York Attorney General's office is preparing charges against several high-ranking Bank of America executives over the bank's alleged failure to disclose details about its acquisition of Merrill Lynch, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office is likely to file civil charges against the executives over their role in failing to alert shareholders to mounting losses as well as accelerated bonus payments at Merrill, said the person, who requested anonymity because no charges have been filed yet.
While people go begging for work, losing their homes, getting laid off, our bailed out bank executives made millions. The Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies has a new report, America’s Bailout Barons.
Their key findings:
The Bounty for Bailout Barons: From 2006 through 2008, the top five executives at the 20 banks that have accepted the most federal bailout dollars since the meltdown averaged $32 million each in personal compensation. One hundred average U.S. workers would have to labor over 1,000 years to make as much as these 100 executives made in three.
the percentage of total wages and salaries paid to top executives rose from roughly 28 percent of the national total in 2002 to 33 percent in 2007, just five years later.
Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration data -- without counting billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal radar screens that measure wages and salaries.
Bailed-out insurer AIG again found itself in the crosshairs of bonus rage on Friday over its plans to pay $2.4 million in executive bonuses next week.
But the larger issue is how AIG will deal with its obligation to pay roughly $235 million still owed to employees of its crippled financial products division.
Déjà vu? A very nasty ghost in the machine? How about diversion instead?
Some executives in the group of 130 recipients will get more than $500,000 to stay through 2009, about 200 percent of their salaries.
The awards may equal 100 percent to 300 percent of an executive’s annual salary, and as much as 100 percent for the next round of payments for lower-paid employees, the person said. The retention payments are several times larger than year- end bonuses, which most of the 130 executives will still get in March, the person said.
Even though performance-based bonuses were down last year, the value and prevalence of discretionary bonuses — ones not linked to performance — were up. A result is that C.E.O.’s who have held their jobs for two years received an average total bonus payout of $2.8 million, up 1.1 percent from 2006
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