Stories about stories about Wall Street pay

Posted by Marc Hodak on January 10, 2010 under Reporting on pay | Be the First to Comment

Wall Street will be announcing their year-end bonus results soon to a green-eyed mob.  As usual, the press gets to write their annual story about how “the banks that got us into the financial crisis” and “whom we had to bail out”, and are now set to “pay themselves huge bonuses.”  They then get to write the story about the outrage caused by those stories.  This year, they are going one step further and writing stories about the way their stories will create outrage.

The story they will not write, once again, is about how the government created the financial crisis, put itself in a position of having to bail out the largest financial institutions, beginning with Fannie and Freddie, then somehow managed to pin the blame on anyone but themselves.

Alas, taking credit and shifting blame is what politics is all about–that and squandering society’s scarce capital on questionable projects.  And pandering to readers’ most primal emotions, with a casual interest in the truth, is how one sells papers.

But banks are being resented for what they do–give money to people with the hope of getting repaid.  And when they do a good job, and society has its scarce capital allocated a little more efficiently, the banks make money, and their people make money.  But when bankers make much more money than journalists or politicians, well, that apparently can’t be allowed.