September 26, 2008
Sorry, Mike Dresser
While the bail-out may be neccesary that doesn’t mean it isn’t effectively putting money into “companies’ shareholders and boards” since many of the bankrupties are arguable predicated on the greed of the executives:
Henry Paulson, who in his current role as Treasury Secretary is pushing for a bank bailout, accounts for $82 million of the total. That was his pay for three years (2003 to 2005) as CEO of Goldman Sachs. DeBoskey included the pay of 57 different individuals, pulling the data that companies report on their top 5 officials to the Securities & Exchange Commission, to get to the $2.1 billion total.
Now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, the smallest of the five companies, was tops in pay. It doled out $743 million in compensation for all its top officers from 2003 through 2007. Next was Goldman Sachs with $726.5 million, then AIG at $336 million, Fannie Mae at $207.2 million and Freddie Mac at $90 million.
Applying the same analysis to a broader universe of banks, financial firms, insurers, mortgage brokers and others who DeBoskey identifies as the companies likely to benefit from the proposed bailout and the total executive pay comes to $27 billion.
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