"Repent," the preacher cried out, startling those who heard him. This was no street evangelist ranting at the passing crowd, but the archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England. His sharp admonition was pointed directly at a particular set of sinners, who undoubtedly had never given any thought to the morality of their actions: the barons of global banking. As in our country, people in Europe are enraged at those hustlers of high finance who wrecked the world's economies, then flexed their political muscle to get governments to replenish their bankrupt vaults. Infuriatingly, these bailed-out bankers have now returned to business as usual, including grabbing monstrous bonus payments for themselves.---

Wall Street bankers are really mad these days -- in both senses of that word! You'd think these whizzes of speculative finance would be ecstatically happy and filled with gratitude, not anger. After all, having crashed our economy, they were allowed to keep their cushy jobs, get bailed out with trillions of our tax dollars, and permitted to go right back to playing the same old casino games that had previously enriched them at our expense. Once again, such powerhouse outfits as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are raking-in tons of money -- and, as in the gilded days before Wall Street plunged Main Street into deep recession, bankers have promptly reverted to the selfish ethic of lavishing multimillion-dollar bonuses on themselves. Goldman, for example, has already set aside more than $16 billion to dole out as end-of-year bonuses for its bankers. That's a pace of self-enrichment that will siphon off nearly half of all the money that Goldman takes in this year! So, why are they mad? Because you and I are not showing them any love. Believe it or not, Wall Streeters actually expected that their return to grandiose banker bonuses would be greeted with huzzahs and "you the man" cheers from an admiring public, rather than another coast-to-coast explosion of anger.

"American International Group Inc.’s highest-paid executives in the unit blamed for pushing the insurer to the brink of collapse haven’t returned bonuses as they’d promised, according to the Obama administration. Four of five managers in AIG’s Financial Products unit under the jurisdiction of pay master Kenneth Feinberg didn’t make good on pledges to return the retention bonuses as of August, Feinberg said in documents released yesterday. The fifth employee hadn’t made any promise, Feinberg said. The pay master rejected AIG’s proposal to pay the five executives a total of $13.2 million this year."

"The lead headline, in the upper right-hand corner, said: “U.S. Deficit Rises to $1.4 Trillion; Biggest Since ’45.” The headline next to it said: “Bailout Helps Revive Banks, And Bonuses.” We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted."

Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year -- a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street's pay culture. Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.

The Treasury Department failed to investigate adequately a massive and complex employee bonus program at American International Group before giving the faltering insurance company billions in taxpayer aid, according to a new report by Treasury's independent watchdog. The multibillion-dollar "executive" compensation program was so widespread that even kitchen workers and mail-room assistants benefited, says an audit released Tuesday by Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky.

Instead of short term bonuses, CEO's should be paid bonuses over ten or twenty years, or even over the rest of their lives with the amount varying according to the current performance of the company, and of course ending if the company goes bankrupt. One way to do this is to give them stock with no-options: no option to sell, especially to pump and dump with insider trading.

Charlie Gasparino reports that senior executives inside Goldman are in a panic over its image, trying to hire a "brand manager"—and even blaming a prejudice against the firm's Jewish chiefs. How worried are Goldman Sachs executives about their ability to manage the coming media tsunami when bonus season comes around?

"Thousands of top traders and bankers on Wall Street were awarded huge bonuses and pay packages last year, even as their employers were battered by the financial crisis. Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general."

Congress wants to give the government a direct role in deciding how much executives on Wall Street are paid, after the nation's biggest banks accepted billions in taxpayer money and still managed to distribute $1 million bonuses to thousands of employees. The House was expected to pass legislation Friday by Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, that would ban "incentive-based" pay that could threaten the economy or viability of the institution. The bill, which would give regulators nine months to hash out the details, would give the government unprecedented say in how private corporations reward brokers and traders.

There are a number of stories out there about Goldman Sachs gaining unfair advantage in the financial markets. One concerns a former employee who allegedly swiped a special program to maximize automated stock trades. Questions were raised about the propriety of this since Goldman is hauling in tons of cash on a daily basis while others struggle. A variation of this story involves speculation that Goldman gets insider information through some internet scheme and uses that to maximize their haul. But the biggest outrage is what's happened in public. We Made Goldman Sachs what it is Today If it weren't for our tax dollars and the cash flow that citizens provide for the United States Treasury, Goldman Sachs would have joined Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers in the graveyard of financial high flyers.

"The Department of Defense paid former Halliburton subsidiary KBR more than $80 million in bonuses for contracts to install electrical wiring in Iraq. The award payments were for the very work that resulted in the electrocution deaths of US soldiers, according to Department of Defense documents revealed today in a Senate hearing. More than $30 million in bonuses were paid months after the death of Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a highly decorated, 24-year-old Green Beret, who was electrocuted while taking a show at a US base in January 2008. His death, the result of improper grounding for a water pump, has been classified by the US Army Criminal Investigations Division (CID) as a "negligent homicide."

The U.S. Army paid "tens of millions of dollars in bonuses" to KBR Inc, its biggest contractor in Iraq, even after it concluded the firm's electrical work had put U.S. soldiers at risk, according to a source close to a U.S. congressional investigation. The Senate Democratic Policy Committee plans to hold a hearing on Wednesday to examine KBR's operations in Iraq, and question why the Army rewarded the Houston-based company. The panel says KBR has been linked to at least two, and as many as five, electrocution deaths of U.S. soldiers and contractors in Iraq due to "shoddy work." Investigators believe hundreds of other soldiers may have received electrical shocks, the source added. The Army is investigating.

"AIG now says it paid out more than $454 million in bonuses to its employees for work performed in 2008. That is nearly four times more than the company revealed in late March when asked by POLITICO to detail its total bonus payments. At that time, AIG spokesman Nick Ashooh said the firm paid about $120 million in 2008 bonuses to a pool of more than 6,000 employees. The figure Ashooh offered was, in turn, substantially higher than company CEO Edward Liddy claimed days earlier in testimony before a House Financial Services Subcommittee. Asked how much AIG had paid in 2008 bonuses, Liddy responded: 'I think it might have been in the range of $9 million.'"

Still responding to public outcry over millions in bonuses paid to executives of the bailed-out insurance giant AIG, the House has approved legislation to limit any compensation deemed "excessive."

Yesterday, four banks announced a return of the federal funding they earlier received, and five other banks have notified the Treasury that they intend to do the same. This isn't because these banks are doing super-fantastic, though. Apparently, they're returning the funds because to accept them would limit the bonuses that their executives would be able to receive; the bailout specifically restricts bonuses to one-third of an executive's total compensation. One of them (Signature Bank of New York) openly admitted that to be the reason for the return of funding. To hell with the money they could use to solidify their banks' standings and help improve the economy; they're only interested in how much money they themselves can pocket.

"The political firestorm over the $165 million bonuses to executives at the failed American International Group (A.I.G.) that ripped through Washington, DC, in mid-March could be reignited by further attention on failing financial companies who were given taxpayer dollars then turned around and spent the cash on bonuses. ... In its last days as an independent company, Merrill gave performance-based bonuses exclusively to employees earning $300,000 a year or more and holding a rank of vice president or higher, according to their financial statements. $3.62 billion was handed out to these executives - a sum equal to 36.2 percent of the $10 billion in taxpayer funds that were allocated to Merrill as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) before the bonuses were paid."

President Barack Obama is wagering significant political capital by signalling opposition to a highly popular congressional drive to slap a punitive 90 per cent tax on bonuses to big earners at financial institutions deeply in debt to taxpayers. Obama defended his stand by saying the tax, passed quickly in the House of Representatives last week, would be unconstitutional and that he would not "govern out of anger". But he declared his determination to make Wall Street understand it must shed "the old way of doing business."

Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told CBS News’ Harry Smith on Face The Nation Sunday that the executive branch ought to use its leverage as a majority shareholder in AIG to sue the company for its wrongful use of retention bonuses. Retention bonuses are to a great extent extortion, Frank argued. “I think there was an element, frankly, with some — not all of them — of almost extortion, where they said, 'We know what you need to know and we will quit if you don’t bribe us,'” Frank said. He argued that there is a large pool of very talented people who have lost their jobs in the financial crisis and that AIG could replace the bonus recipients (some of whom are responsible for creating the firm's now-toxic assets) rather than bribe them with retention bonuses.

By R J Shulman 22 Mar 2009 Taking a cue from the recent tax imposed by Congress on AIG executive bonuses, the New York Yankees are asking Washington to impose a 90 percent tax on the bonus the Yankees paid its star third baseman, Alex Rodriguez. "It's not fair to America's pastime to reward such a large bonus when his numbers just haven't come up to expectations," said Yankees general manager Brian Cashman. New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, an early supporter of the A-Rod tax, told Congress that "it must come to the aid of the New York Yankees because they are too big to fail." (Satire)