*Enough with the bonuses

As with so many things involving Wall Street, the subject is a lot more nuanced than many folks might think. Don't get me wrong, there’s no shortage of uber-greedy bizguys who have made so much money for so many years that they think it's some sort of divine right. The best example is ousted Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, who will forever be remembered as the creep who spent $1 million redecorating his office while his once-mighty financial firm was burning. Trouble is most bonuses go to the rank and file and not the top players (several of whom have either cancelled their bonuses or have been fired). Bonuses shouldn't even be called bonuses - they're a type of compensation that's anticipated each year and often serves as the bulk of a worker's annual pay. It's based on the person's performance, not on the misdeeds of the firm he happens to work for. From Brian Sullivan at Fox Business:

What many in Washington (and across America) forget is that most people on Wall Street are, at the core, salespeople. Additionally, the majority of “Wall Street” - despite politicians who like to lump the hundreds of thousands of financial industry workers into a single group of “them” - had nothing to do with what is happening right now with the economy or credit crisis. They are a diverse group who do thousands of different jobs across a variety of industries. Stock brokers, commodities traders, investment bankers, and the hundreds of other specialized careers in finance have little to do with each other, much less be able to be harvested into some “group” to be singled out for misdeeds. The President likes to use phrases such as “Wall Street folks” when making critical comments about the state of the economy. That is no better than saying something to the effect of “those folks in California” should’ve “known better” than to buy homes when the market was clearly in a bubble.

The NYT's Joe Nocera is painting with a much broader brush:

What happened, put simply, is that the people who thought of themselves as the smartest guys in the room — and were paid accordingly — weren’t so smart after all. They brought down the financial system. They lost so much money that only the government can save them. The scolding they got from the president this week suggests that they’re going to be paying a price — richly deserved, I might add — for a good long time.

[CUT]

Ira Kay, a top executive consultant with Watson Wyatt, told me that this bonus season has been akin to “war” inside many Wall Street firms. “It is a small group of people who caused the problems,” he said. But other bankers had very good years — and all over New York they are now complaining about their smaller bonuses, completely tone-deaf to how this sounds outside their Wall Street silos. You can make a pretty convincing argument that that culture — and the bonuses that flowed from it — had a lot to do with creating the financial crisis. If Wall Street can’t bring itself to admit as much, the new administration and the Democratic Congress are going to be more than happy to point it out.

*Evan Newmark offers another interesting take of the bonus situation at Deal Journal:

Now, I’m a creature of Wall Street. I am as sympathetic an observer as you will find. Is a $112,000 average Wall Street bonus excessive? Not to me. In the greater New York area, the tax rate is effectively 50% which leaves you about $56,000. That won’t even cover the average annual rent of $60,000 for a two bedroom apartment in Manhattan. But consider that the median price of a U.S. home is about $175,000 and you can understand why the rest of America feels differently than me. And why Obama has no choice but to express outrage over your behavior. How can the president get Congress to further subsidize you if you are perceived as ripping off the taxpayer?