Getting Theirs Cuts Both Ways on Wall Street
There was none of the old swagger at Citigroup headquarters on Friday. The bonus checks had landed — and some of the bankers were grumbling.
After a year of yawning losses at the company, employees lamented that times were getting lean. The giant bank, the recipient of two multibillion-dollar rescues from Washington, had paid out only about $4 billion in bonuses.
Only?
Many of those walking to work on Wall Street in Manhattan are walking away with less bonus pay because of outside pressure.
After a year of yawning losses at the company, employees lamented that times were getting lean. The giant bank, the recipient of two multibillion-dollar rescues from Washington, had paid out only about $4 billion in bonuses.
Only?
If you’ve never worked on Wall Street, it is hard to wrap your head around the idea that a company that lost nearly $19 billion in a single year, as Citigroup did in 2008, could still pay its employees billions in bonuses. It is probably even harder to believe that some of those employees grumble about it.
“I feel like I got a doorman’s tip, compared to what I got in previous years,” said a 30-something investment banking associate at Citigroup’s offices in Lower Manhattan.
That kind of glum talk is being heard all over Wall Street, where money is the measure and bonuses the ultimate yardstick. To bankers and traders, bonuses, which account for the bulk of their pay, justify those long days and sleepless nights spent crunching numbers or watching bond prices dance across computer screens.
But with everyone from President Obama on down chastising bankers for paying themselves billions in bonuses at a time taxpayer money is propping up the financial industry, once-unthinkable questions are starting to arise. Could bonuses, the stuff of Wall Street dreams, become a thing of the past? Could this decades-old incentive system, born of the private partnerships that once ruled Wall Street, be replaced? If so, by what?
Getting Theirs Cuts Both Ways on Wall Street – NYTimes.com.
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