Goldman Sachs set to pay £3.5bn in bonuses

Source: Times Online

GOLDMAN SACHS, the world’s biggest investment bank that is now assailed by accusations of fraud, is poised to reignite controversy over bankers’ bonuses by paying its staff more than £3.5 billion for just three months’ work.

The bumper payouts will equate to about £110,000 a head for the firm’s 32,500 employees worldwide, with a handful of top traders expected to be in line for multi-million-pound bonuses.

Close to £600m is expected to be paid to the group’s 5,500 London-based staff for the first three months of this year. This is on a par with their remuneration in 2007, the last year of the boom.

The revelation of the enormous pay deals comes as Goldman prepares for a legal battle with the US government. The group was sued on Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wall Street regulator, over claims it defrauded investors of $1 billion. Goldman denies the charges.

Read more: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article7100961.ece

---

This is God's work, right? /sarcasm off.

I keep thinking nothing can shock me anymore, but then you guys come up with another shocker.

Time to call/write our Reps/Senators and demand new regulations be enacted and fines/jail time be given to these in-your-face creeps. This is the last straw!

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/business/01hedge.html

Pay of Hedge Fund Managers Roared Back Last Year

the top 25 hedge fund managers took home an average of $1 billion in 2009.


Top from left: David Tepper ($4 billion), George Soros ($3.3 billion), James Simons, John Paulson, Steve Cohen; Bottom from left: Carl Icahn ($1.3 billion), Edward Lampert, Kenneth Griffin ($900 million), John Arnold, Philip Falcone.

every day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons
PhD at 23 is always impressive...andBerkeley is actually number one in math (though thatwas a few years ago - not sure where it was then or right this minute).

Chern-Simons theory got him respect as a mathematician.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chern%E2%80%93Simons_theory

Terry Tao has him beat for sure - that punk kid was a full professor at 21 at UCLA before he won the Fields medal. My advisor raves and raves about Valdimir Voevodsky - my advisor was great - got his Doctor of Science in Russia at age 27 (usually that takes 10-12 years after the PhD to get) - and my advisor thinks that Voevodsky had done enough brilliant work for 10 lifetimes.

So are you hanging out at the IAS? That could be one place where you would talk to 8 mathematicians more brilliant than Simons before lunch. Not sure you can do that outside of the IAS - unless you are in France - IHES?

Andrew Wiles, John Conway, Harold Kuhn (ok he's emeritus), Ingrid Daubechies (ok, she's an applied mathematician), Charles Fefferman, Andrei Okounkov, Yakov Sinai and Manjul Bahrgava?

Not outrageous at all.

Cure for cancer? Income security for old folks? Fun game for kids? Better schools? Re-education that works for convicts?

Did any one of them do any more than line their own personal pockets by taking away money resources from things that actually are real and could benefit everyone?

Any of them any more productive than the guy who comes to see you and says, "Nice little business/house/family you got there. Shame if anything happened to it."

and I don't mean to imply that bonuses are meant to do that. I would never in 3.5 Billion years think that.

We wouldn't have been much worse, and perhaps better, without the bailouts. But these bums would be broke.

Selling CDOs, designed to fail, and then collecting the insurance (AIG/taxpayer) is the work of financial geniuses!
That's why they're paid so well.

let the chips fall where they may. Nationalize it and sell it off to pay it's debts to the taxpayers.

they produce nothing, they are leeches sucking the blood out of the economy.

What goods or services do they provide to people to justify those salaries? They don't work as hard as someone making minimum wage. They don't produce anything that can be seen.

As far as I can tell they are like leeches that feed on the hard work of other people.

:wtf: