And people wonder why bankers are hated. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1999. Wages are stagnant. Young people are stuck with a trillion dollars of student loan debt and part time jobs at TGI Fridays. Average Americans don’t have money left to consume, so retailers are being destroyed and closing thousands of stores.
Too Big To Trust Wall Street Mega-Banks have been handed billions of newly printed dollars on a daily basis by the their wholly owned central bank to gamble with no risk of loss. They can borrow at 0% from this same central bank and then deposit those funds back with the central bank to earn .25%. This generates billions in risk free profits.
These same banks can mark the toxic loans on their balance sheet at whatever they choose. This allows them to release billions of loan loss reserves every quarter, generating accounting entry profits. They have no interest in making loans to small businesses or little people. That’s old school banking. Gambling with derivatives knowing the Fed has their back is how it’s done today.
What a business model. These parasites on the ass of America add absolutely no value to society. NONE. They have destroyed our economic system and won’t be satisfied until it is a smoking ruin. For this they reward themselves with $26.7 billion of bonuses for a job well done. There aren’t enough lampposts for what needs to be done.
Wall Street bonuses rose 15% in 2013 to post-financial-crisis high
The average person working in the securities industry earned a cool $164,530 bonus last year — 15% more than a year before.
An aggregate $26.7 billion was paid out in 2013 bonuses to the industry’s 165,200 employees, the highest figure since the 2008 financial crisis, according to figures released Wednesday by New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli.
To put that bonus-pool figure in perspective, it would be enough to more than double the pay of the more than 1 million full-time workers earning the federal minimum wage, which is currently $7.25 per hour, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.
The bonus increase on Wall Street is a result of firms’ engaging in deferred compensation, according to the comptroller’s report. Financial firms are now paying out a smaller share of bonuses immediately and are instead deferring a larger share into future years.
DiNapoli’s office noted that the securities industry “navigated through some rough patches last year” and yet was profitable. “Although profits were lower than the prior year, the industry still had a good year in 2013 despite costly legal settlements and higher interest rates,” said DiNapoli. “Wall Street continues to demonstrate resilience as it evolves in a changing regulatory environment.”
Major regulatory reforms since the financial crisis have changed the way the industry does business. Firms are now required to maintain larger reserves, and proprietary trading has been limited, while additional changes are aimed at reducing unnecessary risk and enhancing transparency, the report notes.
In fact, the industry has been profitably for five consecutive years since the financial crisis, which includes its three best years on record. That despite the challenges the industry has faced in light of lower revenues from the core businesses of trading and investment banking.
Several firms, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. JPM and Citigroup Inc. C , have indicated weakness in these areas.
Total Wall Street profits for the broker-dealer operations of New York Stock Exchange member firms were $16.7 billion in 2013, the comptroller’s office said.
Other nuggets gleaned from the report:
• The average salary, including bonuses, paid to securities-industry employees in New York City in 2012 was 5.2 times the average pay in the rest of the private sector, which was about $69,200 as of 2012.
• The securities industry, considered one of the city’s major economic engines, accounts for 22% of all private-sector wages paid in New York, despite accounting for just 5% of the city’s private-sector jobs.
– Sital S. Patel
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– Follow Sital @Sital
You must understand, they’re doing the Lord’s work – right here on earth. I would recommend to any banksters keeping their finger on the pulse of America’s anger via TBP to restrict your work activities to a ‘to the private airport hanger in less than five minutes radius’…..and keep that bitch fueled and running, 24/7.
Liberal spin will be these banks are doing good, the market is doing good, so America is doing good, be happy, thank you obama, and the drones will swallow it.
When the SHTF they will die.
This gives me GREAT comfort.
Wall Street Bonuses Soar 15% To Highest Since 2007
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/12/2014 15:51 -0400
Wall Street bonuses (on average) in 2013 rose 15% to the highest since 2007. As OSC Tom DiNapoli notes, “Securities industry employees took home significantly higher bonuses on average… although profits were lower than the prior year.” In fact, as we noted earlier, profits at the banks fell 30%.
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Average compensation for securities industry professionals in New York City ($360,700) were 5.2 times greater than the rest of the private sector ($69,200).
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Thank You Ben…
Just another incident of the immoral behavior of Wall Street owners. Just a little more, just a small extra push and they will exceed the patience of the people and TSHTF..
MA
Those who willfully ignore the unfolding currency war are probably undervaluing their risks. So let’s see what happens, and what the days ahead may reveal. I think there is a sickness in the valuations of things, and the ways in which money is being distributed, and wealth is quietly stolen. There are some ugly creatures running through the underbrush and the darkness, as men make beasts of themselves to avoid the pain of being human.
Time does not always make things clear, and the truth can be hidden for long periods of time. But there are clues, and facts enough, for those with inquiring minds, who do not avert their eyes from the facts, fearing their implications. Things may have seemed difficult before, but the real revelations seem as though they are yet to come.
Jesse
“The average person working in the securities industry earned a cool $164,530 bonus last year.”
I don’t get into class warfare and money envy. The most I earned after 34 years was $52K/year and NEVER got a bonus in any one of those years. Me and those folks will be dead someday, and the playing field will be evened.
“Average” incomes tell you nothing. The “average” of $164,530 a year for workers in securities industries tells you absolutely nothing about how badly rewarded most people working in financial are.
“Averages” are extremely misleading. If you have a office with 40 people making $35K each, and one executive making $2.4M, what’s the “average” yearly income for that group? You can easily see that a large cohort of top executives and traders pulling salaries and bonuses of $40m a year can easily skew the average for a large pool of a couple of hundred thousand “workers” who are usually lucky if they make $50K a year.
Like the economy as a whole, the financial industry has become extremely bifurcated. You are either an Ivy League educated Golden Boy who starts at $400K a year and is on track to be earning bonuses in the 10s of millions of $$$ by the time he’s 30… or you’re one of the 99.995% of the industry that works for either modest salaries, or on straight commission selling investments (“registered representatives” or “stockbrokers” or “financial consultants”) or mortgages and loans. If you are really, really talented as a salesman and put in the requisite 10-12 hour days when things are running hot, you might be able to make $100K- $200K a year in really good years, between long stretches of barely making enough to survive on.
Used to be, in this business, that 20% of participants made 80% of the money, as it is in most businesses. That’s acceptable and reflects the difference in contributions and talent.
Now, though, .005% earn 99.995% of the money in this business, and if you are starting out as some “registered representative” with your little S7 and S66 license, you need not hope to get near the place where you can become one of the $20M Bonus Boyz. You will, after 20 years of slogging along schmoozing retail “mom and pop” investors, top out a good deal under where those people start….. if you’re very lucky. If you’re NOT lucky, you may end up as the target of a lawsuit, that, no matter how frivolous or unmerited, will cost you a minimum of $10,000 to defend against. If is is major, the award will blow you straight out of the business.
And “deregulation”? Please. Only the top of the industry was “deregulated”. For all the retail hacks working out here dealing with public customers, the regulatory vise gets tighter every day, and compliance costs and risks are driving small shops out of business, while commissions continue to fall, mostly from competition posed by online firms that enable customers to run trades for as little as $4. FINRA has half the member firms it had even 5 years ago.