executive pay

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 [...]

Rick Wagoner may be leaving his position as CEO of General Motors but he’s not going away empty handed. Though he cannot receive a severance package under the terms of the auto industry bailout, he is due to receive some $20 million in retirement benefits after 32 years with with the company.
And this is on [...]

Long before the AIG bonus scandal erupted this month, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) was at the forefront of (failed) congressional efforts to install stricter pay limits for employees of bailed out banks. Sherman was an early critic of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, arguing last fall that it didn’t go nearly far enough to prevent [...]

The federal government’s answer to the furor over AIG’s payments of ridiculous multi-million dollar bonuses to the same executives who helped drive the company into the ground seems to be “we can’t break a contract.”
But what about what the executives promised to do under those employment contracts?  Surely those contracts required managers and executives to [...]

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 [...]

When Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) Friday called Wall Street executives “idiots” for using taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses, then proposed that compensation for the employees of all bailout recipients be capped at $400,000 per year, it surely seemed to many Americans like an obvious limit to place on the Wall Street [...]

Merrill Lynch — the former Wall Street titan that was recently acquired by Bank of America — like most investment banks, typically pays about 50 percent of its revenue in compensation. The chart (after the jump) depicts Merrill’s revenue and compensation data since 2000 — and it demonstrates that the Wall Street giant dramatically broke [...]

As our story pointed out Thursday, investors are worried about a lot of banks lately — including the Federal Home Loan Banks, the 12 regional institutions that are a crucial source of low-cost mortgage money to many other banks.
For years, the obscure banks had a reputation for poor risk controls and sloppy accounting, as regulators [...]

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is again focusing on the hard-to-fathom salaries of financial executives, writing to the CEO’s of the nine banks that were partly nationalized as part of the Treasury Dept.’s $700- billion rescue plan.
Waxman, chair of the House oversight committee, points out that Treasury spent a combined $121 billion to buttress these banks, [...]