{"id":890,"date":"2009-10-24T11:52:26","date_gmt":"2009-10-24T17:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/?p=890"},"modified":"2009-10-24T11:52:52","modified_gmt":"2009-10-24T17:52:52","slug":"just-compensating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/2009\/10\/just-compensating\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Compensating"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Daniel Gross, at Slate, wrote <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2233310\/\">a Moneybox commentary <\/a>on Wall Street bonuses. He makes a point in it that I did not realize:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>At most companies, bonuses are paid out of profits. No end-of-year profits, no bonuses. But on the island nation of Wall Street, they&#8217;re paid out of revenues.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Bonuses out of revenues, what sort of nonsense is that? No wonder they can pull down ridiculously obscene compensation. Let&#8217;s see &#8211; we are doing a 10 billion dollar refinancing, we want 10% to do it and 50% of that will go into the bonus pool. The other 50% will go to pay for the office building, the corporate jets,\u00a0 the million dollar salaries; your basic operating expenses. Anything left over would be profit. How do they get away with it?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Since the 1980s, notes Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, it&#8217;s been the standard for half of revenues to be devoted to compensation. So long as these outfits were private partnerships, that practice didn&#8217;t really matter to the rest of us. But since the 1990s, when investment banks went public, compensation has evolved into a zero-sum game between employees and shareholders. Guess who lost?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Any compensation in excess of the annual presidential salary is not deductible from corporate ledgers and the corporation must pay corporate taxes on excessive compensation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Daniel Gross, at Slate, wrote a Moneybox commentary on Wall Street bonuses. He makes a point in it that I did not realize: At most companies, bonuses are paid out of profits. No end-of-year profits, no bonuses. But on the island nation of Wall Street, they&#8217;re paid out of revenues. Bonuses out of revenues, what &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/2009\/10\/just-compensating\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Just Compensating<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4NpF-em","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":893,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions\/893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}