For months now I have been a bitch about the taxpayers money being used to give bonuses to the fat cats on Wall Street…..at every turn the banks have gotten a special treatment and it looked like the taxpayer was screwed…..
Today Obama will announce a plan to recover upwards of $120 billion of the money originally given the banks….
Obama’s announcement will come as U.S. unemployment is stuck in double digits and public anger is growing over big bonuses that some financial firms are poised to resume paying, barely a year after the height of the global financial crisis that made the bailout necessary.
The Obama administration official said the amount of money raised from the fees would not exceed $120 billion since this was the higher end of conservative estimates of the cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me….but as usual there is a downside to the plan…..The source, speaking anonymously because the fee has not officially been proposed, said government officials are also discussing exempting automakers and insurer American International Group from the fee, even though these companies are expected to represent a large chunk of the bailout losses.
There are other ways of “Making Them Pay”……that would be a Goldman-Sachs shareholder that is suing the company……this was posted in “Before Its News”:
the firm is supposed to spend about 50% of its net revenue on salaries and bonuses. But in 2008 Goldman dished out $4.82 billion in bonuses despite earnings of only $2.32 billion..In the first quarter of 2009, it spent 259% of its net income on employee and executive compensation and in the second quarter 193%. Brown is now Goldman for exceeding its own rules on salaries and bonuses.
I makes me happy to see that at least someone is mad enough to do something as a payback for the screwing the banks have given the taxpayer….I just wish more people would take these a/holes to task….
Well, I have to say that I think the Obama approach is (for once) spot on in the circumstances.
maybe it’s also fair to exempt people like auto makers too, since they were hardly responsible in any way for the financial crash, were they?
Of course – except that it would be playing and experimenting with people’s lives and government couldn’t do that, could it? Could it? Sorry, I digress (again)… of course, if you’d just let the banks crash and then given every single American citizen (man, woman and child) a thousand or two dollars to go out and spend however they liked, wouldn’t the cost have been similar and might that not have “stimulated” the economy back into health a lot quicker and more effectively?
Yep…you idea would have created demand…something I have been yelling about for over a year now…plus I could use a few extra bucks….
Actually, looking at it again… If I’ve got my figures right (there has to be a first time for eveything, eh?) isn’t the population of the US somewhere around 250 million and the cost of the total bailout package way over a trillion? If that’s roughly right, you could have given everyone (bankers, financiers, lawyers and bureaucrats exempted of course!!!) about four or five grand each and, on top of that, since all the loan companies would have gone belly up, no one would be paying mortgages either. Sounds good to me! What do you think? 😆
See….we could have saved money if we had done it your way…..go figure