Bank CEO thinks journalist salaries are 'outrageous'

Frankly, I've always thought you were way overpaid.

 

If I made millions of dollars working for a bank, I'd hope I'd have the decency to be careful how to word anything that might make it seem to people making $35,000 a year that I'm not grateful to have had the opportunity to make millions, and that I'm aware that without them and many others, and their blood, toil, tears and sweat, that opportunity would not have been possible.

What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams? Keep it to yourself.

 

He would have been better off if he had just said, "Our employees are paid well. But you know what? We made $19 billion. We can afford to pay them well."

 

See also, noblesse oblige.

 

The issue with populist opinion on banker compensation, to me, falls on two things:

1. The bailout. The government had a vested interest in bailing out the banks in '08, although Ragu, your point again about picking winners and losers stands. Those banks collapse, the economy gets even worse, and the US is in an even bigger shithole that maybe it can't climb out of.

But where I think people (except for the total pro-free market ones) turned on the bailout wasn't necessarily because it happened. But because the banks took the money, and handed out bonuses to the executives.

Now yeah, I know the bonuses are supposed to be part of the compensation package. But frankly, if it wasn't for the government, they'd be chasing them in bankruptcy court, where they might get pennies on the dollar. And their excuses of "If we don't get them, we'll go work somewhere else," also is ridiculous. If it wasn't for the government propping up the banks, they'd have no other place to go to.

2. Bankers' compensation becomes an issue when it personally affects people. As I've said before, Craig Dubow's compensation was an issue to me because Gannett would tell me to take financial hits (no raises, higher health insurance premiums, furloughs, and, for other Gannett workers, paycuts), while Dubow's compensation was raised. That was money that went out of workers' pockets into the top executives' (see Hopkins' list of money saved by furloughs vs. the increase in bonuses for the top-paid executives. The total was nearly identical).

For banks, it becomes an issue when customers keep getting hit with fees left and right for merely having an account with the bank, fees for the order in which the bank applies your checks (expensive first, then least expensive last) and when they kept getting screwed by credit-card contracts.

Customer see their bank accounts reduced (which, when you think about it, is practically a tax), see the bankers make more money, and figure their money is paying their bonuses. And the whole "Go to another bank or credit union" mantra falls flat when you find out that all banks charge fees "in order to remain competitive". There is no go elsewhere when they are all charging extra.

 

The Golden Nugget.

 

Man, I feel terrible that people of our limited means just aren't USEFUL enough to a bank that makes $19 billion a year in profit. It sure was shitty of us to ask banks to stop colluding on payment stacking. I mean, if we had one transaction that pushed us into overdraft, we DESERVE to pay five overdraft fees. And those banks DESERVED to take our money. They need it more than we do.

Seriously, do you realize you just implicitly DEFENDED screwing people over? Are profits that sacrosanct? Does nothing else matter?

 

There was plenty of regulation of banks for decades from the Depression era to the 80s. Banks seemed to do pretty well back then, until the deregulation mantra hit. Not that many failures, although I will say, I'm not sure when this graph was made because the 2000s decade seems low:

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/1440544/image/19894048-average-bank-failures-per-year-by-decade

And while JP Morgan didn't need the money, they were given it. And they could have used it to loan out to people who need it (wisely, not just willy-nilly like the banks had been doing) and make more money. Instead, they sat on it and decided to buy up other businesses for themselves. Which was a screw-up by the government by not requiring them to loan it out.

Essentially the government was saying, "Here, take the money, help some people out, and make more money. You have to take it because we want to help your competitors. But you'll be helped too."

And please spare me the complaint over the poor banks not making money. They made 38.5 BILLION in just overdraft fees in 2009:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/09/banks-make-38-billion-fro_n_255135.html

Banks have been making shitloads of money. And they have the nerve to complain when the same people who bailed their asses out are also telling them to stop screwing over their customers.

 

I'm sure there's a counter-argument, but I'll be damned if I can think of it. It's probably because I work at a newspaper.

 

They can still charge overdraft fees. They just can't rearrange transactions to be able to charge four fees when only one transaction was over the limit. But even that is apparently too much.