Obama's Wall St. Pay Czar: Gives Greedy Exec Pay A Scolding, but Not Much Else

[amborin]

Greedy Executive Pay Gets a Scolding and Not Much Else

....Where have we seen this before? The White House has a lot of talk. Then a pay czar is appointed. After some period, a damning report is issued. Then we have the public scolding, while legislation, policy and amendments are ignored and defeated, often by the very same administration.
Any action on the latest outrage du jour? Nah.
Such is the the Obama administration's pay czar's report. To be fair, the Pay Czar was given no power to actually get the ill gotten gains back. He also was limited to institutions who received TARP funds, not the real bail out going on at the Federal Reserve.

....The Special Master for TARP Executive Compensation, Kenneth R. Feinberg, a.k.a. Pay Czar, was chartered to monitor executive compensation of bailed out financial firms. This covered 419 banks who received TARP funds. 17 of those banks handed out ill-advised executive compensation tallying $1.6 billion dollars. $1.6 billion dollars equals 26,666 $60,000 a year salaries. In other words, to feed the executive pig, 26,666 people went without a job.

The Special Master did not determine that any payments were "inconsistent with the purposes of

or the TARP or were otherwise contrary to the public interest." The Special Master had no authority whatsoever to force repayments from employees or companies.
The justification to not get the money back is 90% of the $1.6 billion was from banks which repaid TARP.
Of the $1.7 billion in payments identified by the Special Master, more than 90% were made by firms that fully repaid, or were taken into consideration in the Special Master's determinations regarding "exceptional assistance recipients."

That's nice. Uh, what about the trillions in bail out funds coming from the Federal Reserve?
What's interesting is while the main stream media duplicates the same article headline that somehow this is a scolding and a blast on Wall Street, the real Wall Street Press, sees it for what it is, an empty aw shucks.

snip

http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/greedy-executive-pay-gets-scolding-and-not-much-else


***************************************


....President Obama has said that executive pay packages encouraging excessive risk led to the practices responsible for the financial crisis, and his administration has looked for ways to curb executive pay. But officials have acknowledged that some of these actions may not reduce the biggest paychecks on Wall Street.

President Obama appointed Kenneth R. Feinberg compensation overseer or "pay czar" for banks bailed out by the government. In a report released on July 23, 2010, Mr. Feinberg named 17 financial companies that made questionable payouts totaling $1.58 billion immediately after accepting billions of dollars of taxpayer aid in 2008.


http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/e/executive_pay/index.html?scp=3&sq=wall%20street%20executive%20pay&st=cse