{"id":1575,"date":"2009-07-16T16:33:31","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T00:33:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=1575"},"modified":"2009-07-18T13:03:46","modified_gmt":"2009-07-18T21:03:46","slug":"high-performers-are-getting-paid-time-to-stop-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/high-performers-are-getting-paid-time-to-stop-that\/","title":{"rendered":"High performers are getting paid. Time to stop that."},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein had a bad, bad year.\u00a0 They took it on the chin, and paid themselves no bonuses<\/a>.\u00a0 Their JPM and GS colleagues collected little or nothing compared to earlier years, in some cases giving up millions that they might have legitimately earned based on their business units’ good performance in a tough year.\u00a0 In return, GS and JPM got…pilloried with their lesser rivals in the press as paragons of greed.<\/p>\n

This year, it looks like GS and JPM are doing much better thank you.\u00a0 They will be increasing their pay accordingly.\u00a0 Members of Congress, once again, are in a tizzy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Recently reported bonus pools do suggest that there may be a return to the old ways which caused such damage to our economy. It reinforces our determination to adopt a reasonable set of legislative goals,” [Barney] Frank said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This first sentence actually contains two false statements.\u00a0 First, the bonus pools don’t suggest anything, other than the fact that these two firms were quite profitable in the first half of 2009.\u00a0 Second, no evidence has ever been offered that JPM or GS did any damage to our economy.\u00a0 Of all the financial institution that were too big to fail, these two were farthest from failing and, in the case of JPM, saved a TBTF bank or two.<\/p>\n

By the way, Members of Congress, including those on the finance committees directly overseeing Fanny and Freddie, suffered no diminution in pay in 2008.\u00a0 In fact, Barney Frank is taking in record amounts<\/a>, including from the financial firms he is supposedly overseeing.<\/p>\n

Ironically, this was the day that Hank Paulson told Congress that, hell yeah, he put a gun to Ken Lewis’s head last year.\u00a0 Congress professed to be shocked<\/a> that one of their government agents would do such a thing.\u00a0 At the same time, Congress conveniently ignores a similar episode of Paulson as their hatchet man when he forced Dimon and Blankfein to take government money they didn’t want<\/a>.\u00a0 Unlike Lewis<\/a>, the JPM and GS chiefs had little reason to believe they were screwing their shareholders in what would turn out to be a Faustian bargain<\/a>, where the devil got to fill in the terms<\/a> after the contract was signed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year, Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein had a bad, bad year.\u00a0 They took it on the chin, and paid themselves no bonuses.\u00a0 Their JPM and GS colleagues collected little or nothing compared to earlier years, in some cases giving up millions that they might have legitimately earned based on their business units’ good performance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,25],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-1575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-executive-compensation","category-reporting-on-pay","tag-doesnt-barney-deserve-a-raise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1575"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1579,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions\/1579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}