Today in the economy

[Kirkland Laing]

Not even close son
I mean here's the ballpark,and here there is you,youre not in it
Apparently between you and Lyle,there's liberal,conservative,and Ive got to sit here being the realist

Hank Paulson was Bush's last Treasury Secretary. His highest ever official salary was around a million dollars a year but that's just walking around money when you live in Manhattan, send your kids to school there etc. When he retired he had over $700 million in th bank.

We can watch and see how much the execs of banks who are taking government welfare continue to earn over the next few years. I should get a nice piece of quote art or two out of it.

Walked away with
As in past tense

Large banks like Citi that have large brokerage and M and A divisions have modelled themselves and their executive compensation on investment banks like Goldman as over the past couple of decades the investment banks have been making all the big money. And the investment banks only exist to reward the talent that runs them. Goldman for instance share over 75% of all their profits among their partners (and it used to be 100% till the partners sold off a chunk of their firm in stock to make themselves even more money.)

Goldman has a hundred of so guys with a small share and another fifty or so with a larger share. At the end of the year they divvy up six or eight billion between them (that's roughly the Goldman yearly profit over the past few years.) Now these guys earn depending on how much they earned the firm. And in a dog-eat-dog world if some superstar lower in the firm (or a partner or rising star elsewhere) has outperformed the Goldman guy in his field then the existing guy may get the push from his partnership after years of climbing the greasy pole. People get partnerships if they bring a lot of investors with them, etc.

So individuals move from firm to firm earning on the basis of what they bring in, investors/firms who'll follow them from place to place as they trust their expertise in their field. These indiviauals will actually ask for the lowest salary possible (living expenses for twelve months usually) so that their earnings can be paid to them in other ways, deferred salary, company stock etc. That's so that it can all be taxed at a far lower rate than their salary is. They'll pay 45+% of their salary in taxes when you include NY State taxes but in the low teens on everything else.

And if they really did make a serious attempt to keep overall compensation for executives at welfare banks to a million a year then the firm's moneymakers will up sticks, taking their expertise/clients/investors to other firms and the government will be left with a shell of a firm that doesn't make any actual profits anymore as their profit-drivers have all buggered off leaving a profitless mountain of debt and disaster for the government to deal with. So the government has no choice other than to let these banks, which it will eventually own and need to run, staffed by people who can make some money when it does take them over.