Bank collapses
Lehman Brothers file for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch taken over by Bank of America, and stock markets plunge. Will any lessons be learnt? Of course not:
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns paid a combined $US65.6 billion in salary and bonuses in 2007 to their 186,000 employees.
Year-end bonuses accounted for 60% of that total — above the $US36 billion of bonuses awarded in 2006, when Wall Street notched up record profits.
Lets run that again. These banks paid in bonuses an average of $212,000 per employee in the year when everything went tits up. Of course that 186,000 includes all the secretaries, cleaners, and other ancillary staff. Some people at the top of the pile got $millions upon $millions.
Now don’t let these CEOs and the like kid you that their jobs are risky. The average UK worker is in the same job for 5.5 years. The average job span of a CEO is a month or two less. When these guys get sacked in addition to the $millions they get in compensation, they immediately take up paid directorships in other companies, when the average worker losses their job they are out of work for 15 weeks.
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