He was so crooked, you could have used his spine for a safety-pin....Dorothy L. Sayers
He was more crooked than a spiral staircase (a poor rephrasing of a brilliant line from Wodehouse's Leave it to Psmith).
A report in the WSJ states that WS is going to pay record amounts -
The article goes on to report that "...Many firms reiterated that they need competitive pay packages to keep from losing employees to non-U.S. companies, private-equity firms and hedge funds....While Wall Street firms such as Goldman and Morgan Stanley have historically set aside about 50% of revenue for compensation, the rate is lower at commercial banks, which include large numbers of less highly paid employees, such as tellers and other staff in bank branches that the Wall Street firms don't necessarily have."
The stock indices have shot up rapidly over the past few months, but as long as finance is the lead dog, the recovery will be poor. WS rewards firms for outsourcing- why can't the highly paid members of the board outsource the bank executives' jobs to people in India or China or other countries where there is perhaps more talent to be had at much lower prices? One can be certain that there are plenty of individuals in those countries who can run these banks or their trading desks or M&A departments at a fraction of the price of the U.S. bank managers. When the members of the Boards say that they are paying market value for the executives, they are simply not determining the true market value based on global arbitrage- they are determining market value based only on what the corresponding people in the peer institutions are making. This is nothing but a cozy "I scratch your back you scratch mine" club-one that needs to be dismantled or else will lead to a spinal cord injury for the country.
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