Record pay on Wall Street as unemployment rises

Americans won't be happy to learn that Wall Street salaries may be higher this year than they were before the current recession began:


Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year -- a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street's pay culture.

Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.


Ian Welsh wrote a depressing post at Open Left yesterday:


All they did was throw cash at the problem, without dealing with the underlying issues, which is why they didn't manage (as Jerome points out) to kickstart ANY net private spending. They didn't break up major banks. They didn't allow bankruptcy judges to rewrite mortgages. Their mortgage program kept hardly anyone in the house. And their money for financial firms did not increase lending by one cent. [...]

This is going to be the wost "recovery" of your lifetime, unless you're in the financial sector at a relatively high level. Bank profits have recovered but ordinary people are not, in a generation, going to see a full recovery from this clusterfuck - employment will not recover to pre-recession levels before the next recession, and I don't expect it to recover after that recession either.

At this point, in fact, I am expecting this to turn into a double dip recession--this "recovery" will not have any significant legs.


Continuing George Bush's Wall Street bailout policy will prove to be a costly mistake for President Obama. Watch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund's interview with Neil Barofsky, who "monitors a dozen separate bailout-related programs that now account for nearly $3 trillion in financial commitments." Among other things, his research has confirmed that the bailout did not increase lending to the business sector.