Government Sachs Goldman Sachs executives are worried about the negative publicity that will accrue when they announce bonuses for this year.
Full story at The Daily Beast.How worried are Goldman Sachs executives about their ability to manage the coming media tsunami when bonus season comes around?
Paranoia might not be too strong a word to describe the mind-set. People inside Goldman tell me that some senior executives say they believe the onslaught of negative stories detailing Goldman’s manifold ties to upper levels of government, charges that it somehow fraudulently profited from the subprime crisis, and now the press about the firm’s record earnings is so out of proportion to reality that the coverage contains an element of anti-Semitism—subtly playing off the racist myth of a conspiracy of Jewish bankers controlling the world for their own benefit...
Another option, according to people close to the matter, is for Goldman to pay much smaller bonuses and just hand out larger salaries, meaning there won’t be a massive media event that occurs every year once all the bonuses, including Blankfein’s—which hit nearly $70 million for 2007, just months before Goldman’s bailout—are announced...
It almost doesn’t matter—it’s all starting to stick, and Goldman has suddenly replaced Citigroup, Merrill, and even Lehman as the leading culprit of Wall Street greed and abuse committed during the financial crisis. In the good old days, Goldman could just ignore the chattering class, make a lot of money, and tell the rest of the world to screw off...
Goldman will have a piggy bank of more than $11 billion to dole out in bonuses at year’s end, not exactly what most businesses would consider a problem...
This after Goldman was rescued from extinction (this is where I agree with the conspiracy theorists) nearly a year ago, when the financial crisis became most acute, with a $10 billion capital injection from the federal government, not to mention the tens of billions of dollars that flowed right to Goldman’s bottom line when the federal government bailed out AIG and honored all those insurance contracts Goldman held on its own portfolio of risky debt...
I wonder why they keep on making public announcements about the bonuses... Though I understand that it might be a way to boast your corporate ego when the economy is fine, I cannot figure out why they keep on publicizing it. Is there a law or something that says they have to make it public?
ReplyDeleteI believe as a publicly traded corporation they are required by law to make public both salaries and bonuses. If they were a private firm the information would be private as well.
ReplyDeleteHow about donating the bonus fund to the National Debt? Naw. That would be too responsible.
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