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I love this stuff. Hat tip to Jeff, who runs the awesome NADA Guides blog (for you gearheads), for sending this in.
Where are your TARP funds going? And they are yours, you know. Those $700 billion will be financed on your behalf for stuff like this, instead of the school, hospital, roads and lower taxes you were probably hoping for.
From Gawker:
Where is the government’s bank-bailout money going? In part to pay for Wall Street banker Peter Kraus’s $37 million Park Avenue spread.
Kraus had excellent timing. He signed on as a top executive at Merrill Lynch in May, negotiating a $50 million pay package, with much of that guaranteed if the company was sold. He didn’t officially start until September. A couple of days later, Merrill CEO John Thain sold the company to Bank of America for $50 billion, triggering a $25 million payout under Kraus’s contract.
Bank of America got a $25 billion capital injection from the government. Kraus resigned and collected his cash, taking a job as CEO of AllianceBernstein, a money-management firm. And then he bought, for an estimated $37 million, an apartment at 720 Park Avenue from Democratic fundraisers Carl Spielvogel and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel.
If you haven’t thrown up yet, you can read the rest of it here. Or better check out some of the atrocious interior decorating choices made by the Kraus’s (one below, more in the Gawker article).
Courtesy of Gawker
Now, bankers need bonuses. We need smart people to be incented to work hard to figure this out. However, the people that got us in to this mess should be foregoing any bonuses and rewriting their contracts to take a much more humble salary than what they were used to when they were fleecing investors around the world.
It just amazes me that we can have a bailout package with very little oversight, remember this gem?,
?Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.? ? the Treasury Department?s proposed Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, September 2008.
just doling out billions of dollars to the buddies of Hank Paulson and whomever else is a squeeky-enough wheel. A perfect “Why I hate My Industry”.
Last 3 posts by Morgan
- Subprime Bananas - June 28th, 2009
- Roubini: No confidence in government exit strategy - June 24th, 2009
- Goldman bonuses largest in firm's 140-year history - June 21st, 2009
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