executive compensation

It’s April 16, and in Washington this year that signifies something more than a Tea Party hangover. It’s also the date by which Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was asked to respond to congressional questions about the administration’s plans to skirt congressional conditions on Wall Street bailout recipients.

Here’s a saga worthy of much more attention than it’s getting: A House oversight panel launched an investigation Monday into the Treasury Department’s plans to elude Congress-passed executive pay limits on bailout recipients by creating middleman agencies to filter the funds.

The New York Times dug through some new financial records to discover that Wall Street has been nearly as good to Larry Summers as Larry Summers is now being to Wall Street.
Mr. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president who is now the chief economic adviser to President Obama, earned nearly $5.2 million in [...]

When the White House economic team last month rejected a Senate-passed stimulus amendment that would have taxed bailed-out companies at 35 percent for 2008 bonuses, sponsor Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) vowed he’d be back later for another try.
Today, he made good on that promise.

As Weigel pointed out earlier, the GOP appears poised to make a strategy of blaming Democrats — notably Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (Conn.) — for allowing the AIG bonuses that have become so controversial this week.
We pointed out a few reasons earlier today why Dodd doesn’t bear the blame (at least no more [...]

As House leaders are debating a bill to apply a 90 percent tax on controversial bonuses paid by bailout recipients like AIG, at least one Democrat has already found a gaping loophole.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said the bill might rein in bonuses, but it won’t prevent creative [...]

There’s a new argument coursing through Washington in the last 48 hours, which lays the blame for the AIG bonus scandal at the feet of Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) for altering his recently-enacted executive pay proposal to exclude AIG.
The blame is misplaced. Here’s why.

Since the beginning of the financial meltdown last year, Mike Lillis, The Washington Independent’s congressional correspondent, has been documenting the failure of Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations to place tough restrictions on executive compensation as the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve shoveled taxpayer money out the door to bail out America’s largest [...]

In an impromptu press conference today on the White House lawn, President Obama tried to channel anger about AIG multi-million dollar bonuses towards reform of the financial system to make sure this sort of situation doesn’t happen again.

More news on the business ethics front: Some Wall Street firms receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds are finding creative ways to get around executive compensation limits imposed by the government, The Wall Street Journal reports.
In response to expected bonus restrictions, officials at Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley and other financial institutions that got [...]