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Wall Street bonuses are ridiculous
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 It’s time to cut a hole in the side of the mattress (unless you’ve got a waterbed, that is), or find an old cream can and dig a hole in the back yard. After reading an Associated Press article in one of the area dailies last week, I’m not going to let those bums have a single cent of my money.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only American whose blood pressure shot up when I read that Wall Street bonuses climbed 17 percent to $20.3 billion in 2009. Just one year after being on the brink of total failure (ala Black Tuesday of 1929), and being bailed out by the U.S. taxpayers, the braintrusts who control the financial center of this country decided they’ve been doing a good job and deserved a bonus.
Why not? These are some pretty smart folks. They sit in their ivory towers, clad in three-piece Armani suits and Gucci shoes, never breaking a sweat as they play with our life savings.
Things really went well for the Wall Street execs a few years back. America was so engrossed in leveraging everything we had to make bigger profits. The Dow Jones was over 16,000 points, increasing into more rarefied air with each day.
In 2005 these financial wizards received $32 billion in bonuses. That’s right, folks, $32 BILLION, or $173,000 per person. That’s not how much they made in 2005. That’s how much of a bonus they received above and beyond their six and seven-figure salaries.
The bottom fell out of the stock market two years ago, as we all remember. The life savings and nest eggs of millions of Americans went right down the tubes faster than you can flush a toilet. So what did the Bush and Obama administrations do? They collectively threw nearly $1.5 trillion at the problem in an attempt to stop the financial free fall.
Many believe if not for the massive bailout, the American financial system would have come crashing down as it did 80 years ago. For the most part, I agree Uncle Sam had to step in and prevent history from repeating itself. But there needed to be some strings attached…some massive strings and very firm stipulations. And one of the most concert stipulations should have been NO BONUSES!!!!
So what if these financial gurus helped steer us out of the financial collapse? They did it with the help of more than a trillion dollars from Uncle Sam or more precisely from loans from China our children and grandchildren will be paying off for decades to come.
There’s no way they should have been rewarded with bonuses totalling $20.3 billion for this. Just knowing they had an office with a hook on the wall to hang up their Armani should have been good enough.
According to the AP story, the New York Stock Exchange earned a record $49.9 billion through the first three quarters of 2009, with estimates that the 12-month earnings will total $55 billion.
So does than mean that all these trusting Americans, who watched their life savings evaporate into thin air in 2008 and 2009, have now recouped all of those losses? The article didn’t say. And does the $55 billion figure include the $20.3 billion shelled out as bonuses or did the stock exchange actually earn $77.3 billion in 2009? Again, the article did not say.
I guess when you’re talking about trillions of dollars, a few billion here and a few billion there really doesn’t make a lot of difference, right?
As soon as the snow clears, I’m gonna dig that hole in my back yard and find a cream can!
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