Category Archives: pay

WealthPorn Day Arrives

It’s WealthPorn Day today, also known as the day that Alpha magazine releases its annual list of the top-earning hedge fund managers. Of course, that also makes it a great day for politicians, including Hank Paulson, to call for greater … Continue reading

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Blogonomics: Gawker’s Payroll, Redux

You wanna know how much Gawker writers get paid? Well, let me tell you. Remember that they don’t really get salaries any more, just advances. And it’s been widely reported that bloggers on the flagship Gawker site get $7.50 per … Continue reading

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Steve Schwarzman Takes a Pay Cut

Talk about adding insult to injury. Not only have Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone shares plunged since its IPO, knocking billions off his net worth, but the firm has also cut his annual pay to less than $1 million per day. Stephen … Continue reading

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Did Lloyd Blankfein Earn $100 Million in 2007?

There’s a bit of buzz today over Goldman Sachs’s 2007 executive pay packages. It’s all a bit confusing: do you include previous years’ stock grants? How do you account for options? If you add up stock awards and options awards … Continue reading

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Chart of the Day: Real Earnings

This chart, from the NYT, shows annual growth in real wages. What that means is that workers today are earning significantly less, in real terms, than they were a year ago: their January 2008 earnings were down 19 cents per … Continue reading

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Tech Salary Datapoint of the Day

Jeff Bewkes is cutting back: Time Warner, seeking to cut costs and streamline operations, plans to split off AOL’s Internet access business from its Web site and online advertising business and cut 100 jobs at its corporate unit, the company’s … Continue reading

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Mankiw Mathematics

Greg Mankiw isn’t interested in running the NBER; David Warsh explains why. It isn’t that the NBER job pays badly: the current occupant of the job, Martin Feldstein, earns $600,000 in salary, with another $151,000 in benefits, on top of … Continue reading

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Bankers’ Pay: Should be Changed, Won’t be Changed

Why pick on banks, and bankers? Steve Waldman tells us: It’s not because they’re bad people. Most bankers are very nice people. We should pick on them because, as Andrew says, banks intermediate. They are a point where all the … Continue reading

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Why Goldman Sachs Should Implement a Clawback Mechanism

Raghuram Rajan attacks banks’ compensation systems in the in the FT, to applause from Yves Smith, Alea, and Alexander Campbell. The problem, says Rajan, is that bankers get paid enormous sums of money for generating "fake alpha": profits which will … Continue reading

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The Importance of Bonuses

Roger Ehrenberg has an end-of-year post about when he was happiest. He talks about his personal life, but he also talks about his professional life: There are two distinct times that stand out. The first is when I was 30 … Continue reading

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Bonus Watch, Goldman Sachs Edition

At Goldman, all is sunny: Many were celebrating Wednesday. “Are people happy? I think broadly yes. The message was that in a year when the firm has done well, it pays its people well,” said a delighted banker.

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Thain’s Pay

What does Jack Flack make of the fact that John Thain’s employment contract with Merrill Lynch was filed on a Friday evening? It seems to me that Merrill Lynch was trying to bury its details by having them appear on … Continue reading

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The Return of Stock-Based Compensation on Wall Street

Everything old is new again, as Yves Smith points out with respect to UBS’s bonuses. Apparently the poor Swiss bankers won’t get cash this year: everything above a measly $750,000 is going to be paid in stock. Is this kind … Continue reading

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Why Wall Street CEOs Get Paid So Much

Robert Reich thinks that Wall Street CEOs get paid more than their Main Street counterparts because they’re liars: There’s no reason to believe Wall Street executives have been smarter than executives in the real, non-financial economy. They’ve been paid more … Continue reading

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Wall Street Bonus Update

As someone who’s personally invested in this year’s Wall Street bonus pool – I have a bottle of Scotch on the line – I was quite happy to turn to page B5A of this morning’s WSJ. (Please, Mr Murdoch, can … Continue reading

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US Inequality Hits New Record Highs

Greg Ip is all over the inequality beat today, with a whole series of datapoints from the IRS: New data from the Internal Revenue Service shows that in 2005, the richest 1% of tax filers earned 21.2% of all income, … Continue reading

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The Better You Look, The More You See

It seems that Bret Easton Ellis was on to something when he invented Patrick Bateman: For men, every extra 10 minutes daily grooming increases their weekly wages by 6 percent. Interestingly, the effect is much smaller for women: there really … Continue reading

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When Bonuses are Contraindicated

Should companies pay out performance-related bonuses? It turns out that such payments might well be counterproductive: The logic of bonus payments itself seems straight-forward: by paying a bonus on the condition of success, the successful outcome becomes more attractive to … Continue reading

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Labor Market Datapoint of the Day

Bo Peabody’s companies pay their ad sales staff well, it would seem: Digital ad sales at the entry level are getting multiple six figure salaries. I tried checking this with my friendly neighborhood digital entrepeneur, who told me that a … Continue reading

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The Victims of Options Backdating

Sam Gustin, it turns out, contra my earlier assertion, does know who the victims of options backdating are after all. They’re Mr and Mrs Investor Confidence, and apparently they’re both "nebulous" and also "a pillar of the market system". Which … Continue reading

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The Scandal of Options Backdating

One of the reasons Sam Gustin is underwhelmed by the Fake Steve Jobs book is that its author doesn’t take options backdating seriously enough. It’s "nothing short of an epidemic", he says, and "there is something slightly unfunny about basing … Continue reading

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Why Options Backdating is Wrong

Mark Stein has an excellent
overview
today of exactly what is wrong with options backdating (and I’m
not just saying that ‘cos he’s my editor at Portfolio).
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Bill Gross Joins the Billionaires-for-Tax-Hikes Club

Add billionaire Bill Gross, of Pimco, to the list of rich
men who want to raise taxes on the rich.
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Hedge Fund Analysts’ Salaries Soar

Mark Malyszko of Institutional Investor says that pay at hedge funds is through
the roof
.
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Finance Professor Salaries

What drives biz schools’ salaries?
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