Planning to make a career on Wall Street? Harken to this advice. Don’t do a good job. Don’t do a poor job. Do a really terrible job, but do it in a way that makes it seem that only you can salvage a bit of the ruins you helped to generate.
That’s not only the lesson we see on view at firms that tanked in 2008, needed government bailouts to survive, have since managed to pay the government back, and whose top people are now giving themselves truly humongous bonuses. It also seems to apply to these same kinds of people in companies now owned by or quasi-owned by the U.S. taxpayers — you and me.
In this latter regard consider some recent rulings by the government’s special “pay czar” and a federal judge. The former is reported to have allowed an A.I.G. employee making a salary of $450,000 a year to get an additional bonus package of more than $4 million so he would continue to help unravel that now mostly government owned company. This pay czar is also allowing a few top people at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to pull in comp packages that might total more than $6 million this year. A federal judge, meanwhile, was reported to have approved $50 million in bonuses to derivative traders helping to unravel a now defunct Lehman’s $10 billion portfolio.
Why, one might ask, are these people being so exceptionally well rewarded over and above their already very generous pay? If they had only been brought in after the financial horrors at A.I.G, Fannie and Freddie, and Lehman, then they are newcomers to these companies and don’t have more personal knowledge of its working than others who could be brought in now without paying huge bonuses atop large regular salaries. But, as seems to be the cases here, the special knowledge of these bonus babies comes about because they were already on-board when said companies were doing the things that led to their disastrous performances, they would appear to have contributed to these companies’ current dour conditions and the public’s continuing huge bailout costs.
So what’s the lesson to be learned here? Don’t screw up to a minor degree because it will get you canned, but screw up big time and rake it in? Heck, why not. The “free market” types in banking have managed this same trick, so why not the toilers still subject to some sort of government (you’ll forgive the expression) “supervision.”
Oh, by the way. A warning. Do NOT attempt this road to riches in any part of the economy not directly or indirectly linked to Wall Street. Everywhere else, past failure is no guarantee of future super-generous remuneration.