Wouldn't it be nice if all the pressure made Goldman Sachs relinquish its bank holding status and return to private partnerships so they wouldn't have to answer to anyone else?
Nuns ask Goldman Sachs bosses whether they're really worth $69.5 m
by Richard Blackden, US Business Editor -The Telegraph
Goldman Sacs is facing a call from four leading orders of catholic nuns to review whether the pay awarded to chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and other top executives is excessive.The proposal will be put forward at the Wall Street bank’s annual general meeting next month by the orders, who own shares in Goldman, the bank revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Sisters of Saint Joseph of Boston, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia and the Benedictine Sisters of Mt. Angel want Goldman’s compensation committee to report back by the beginning of October.
The bank’s pay practices have faced criticism from religious orders in the past, but this call comes as Goldman revealed last week that its five most senior executives were awarded $69.5m in pay last year despite a drop in the bank’s profits.
Mr Blankfein, who famously said in an interview in 2009 that the bank was doing “God’s work”, received a cash bonus of $5.4m as part of a total pay package of $14.1m for last year.
The Benedictine nuns, along with the US charity, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, also asked Goldman’s committee to explore “how sizeable layoffs and the level of pay of our lowest paid workers impact senior executive pay.”
Goldman has been a lightning rod for public anger at Wall Street since the crisis erupted, even though that outcry is now not as loud as in Britain. Late last year the bank changed how it reported its results to show how much it made from trading and its own investments.
In the SEC filing, the bank said that shareholders already have enough information to assess how Goldman rewards its executives and a further report would “entail an unjustified cost to our firm and would not provide shareholders with any meaningful information.”
Last year, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank were sued by a group of Irish nuns for allegedly failing to redeem an investment for them.
Read the entire article here
3 COMMENTS:
Their greed would make the devil blush, sisters....there is always funds to feed poor investments but never enough to feed hungry stomachs!
the Endgame
Now thank God that USA Inc. is actually a public company, and that the truly competent and noble souls who run the company are in due course going to present us shareholders with, in all likelihood, option number 3. Cause if they weren’t, here’s what a nakedly greedy and essentially misanthropic management team might come up with:
First, they’d keep fabricating astounding sums of money each week, and through various off-balance sheet transactions through its off-balance sheet private company, the U.S. Federal Reserve, would divert large portions of these multi-zero sums into accounts it holds with financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan, and HSBC, and Goldman Sachs, etc, and would begin to actively mange the perception of the general public through its participation in the futures and derivatives markets for strategic commodities like energy and metals.
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/james-west/gold-and-silver-and-the-endgame-for-usa-inc
How do you stop this?
Sleaze Watch: Former NY Fed Bank Supervisors Lobbying to Neuter Regulations
We hear that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is still calling the shots at the Fed of New York via his lieutenants in the bank supervision area. This de facto control is not challenged by former Goldman Sachs (”GS”) economist Bill Dudley. It seems the stench of the prosposed non-competitive resale of the assets to AIG without a public auction was too great even for Dudley to ignore. But the almost-botched disposal of the AIG assets is just the start of the dysfunction and ethical conflicts at the Fed of New York.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/04/sleaze-watch-former-ny-fed-bank-supervisors-lobbying-to-neuter-regulations.html
Especially when pay is a function of privilege...
Michael Burry: Notes from Vanderbilt Speech
•Dr. Burry began by semi-joking that of all the top fifty finance people he’s met, none were as smart as most of his med school classmates
•Due to Wall Street marking against him and his growing investor unrest he was forced to sell his corporate CDS and side pocket his subprime bets
•He really went after Goldman noting that e-mail have subsequently been disclosed that revealed GS orchestrated a short squeeze “to cause maximum pain” to existing shorts in order to pile on the trade themselves at better levels
•Paulson and Bernake grossly underestimated the problem. He is amazed that Paulson didn't realize the extent of sub-prime exposure given his tenure at Goldman
•He notes that many people at different government agencies saw the crisis coming—even more so than he did—but weren't listened to
•Glass Stegall needs a 2nd go
http://www.distressed-debt-investing.com/2011/04/michael-burry-notes-from-vanderbilt.html
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