For example, regarding Goldman Sachs's compensation principles, Blankfein mentioned that those principles "included an emphasis on tying pay to long-term firm performance and avoiding multiyear guarantees." Of course, we all know that the best measure of a new principle is if the originator follows the principle in his own actions. When revenues went down at Goldman Sachs, Blankfein's compensation went up--to $19 million in 2010.
Trading revenue at Goldman Sachs went down in 2010 and in the first quarter of 2011. GS laid off workers but did not touch executive compensation. If things get worse, there will be more layoffs but no reduction in compensation to the executives.
Goldman Shareholders Re-elect Directors, Approve 'Say-On-Pay'
By Christine Harper - Bloomberg Businessweek
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the fifth- biggest U.S. bank by assets, said shareholders re-elected the company’s directors and approved a compensation plan for top executives.Directors were re-elected with 90 percent of the vote and the pay awards for named executive officers were approved by 73 percent in a so-called say on pay vote, General Counsel Greg Palm said today at the New York-based bank’s shareholder meeting in Jersey City, New Jersey. None of the proposals submitted by shareholders was approved, Palm said.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and top deputies including Gary D. Cohn, president and chief operating officer, and David A. Viniar, chief financial officer, received no bonuses for 2008 and no cash bonuses for 2009. Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs said it was increasing salaries for Blankfein and his deputies and paid Blankfein $19 million for 2010, including a $5.4 million cash bonus.
Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. recommended stockholders cast a non-binding vote against the awards for executive officers. The ISS report cited a “pay-for-performance disconnect” after Goldman Sachs’s executives’ compensation increased even as profits fell last year.
Glass Lewis & Co., another proxy advisory service, expressed concern about Goldman Sachs’s “opaque program” for determining compensation, even though it recommended that shareholders vote in favor of the awards.
Social Responsibility
Christian Brothers Investment Services Inc., which manages $4 billion and owns about 68,000 Goldman Sachs shares, voted against the pay awards this year, Julie Tanner, the firm’s assistant director of social responsibility, said in an interview before the meeting.
“I don’t think that the pay level is justified,” Tanner said. “There’s a level beyond which pay is not appropriate and needs to be reined in, and I think this company is one of those examples.”
Goldman Sachs was the most-profitable securities firm when Blankfein, 56, took the helm almost five years ago. While the company survived the financial crisis that bankrupted smaller rival Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and repaid U.S. rescue funds and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., its practices before the crisis have remained under scrutiny.
At last year’s meeting, Blankfein created a business- standards committee to study the firm’s practices and recommend ways they could be improved. The committee, which issued a report in January, was formed in part as a response to an April 2010 Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit alleging the firm misled clients about a mortgage-linked investment. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million in July to settle the suit.
Senate Probe
The questions didn’t end there. Last month the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report on the causes of the financial crisis that accused New York-based Goldman Sachs of misleading clients in its sales of mortgage securities, a charge the firm denies. The report was referred to the Justice Department and the SEC, which have said they are looking into it.
“There are still lingering problems” for Goldman Sachs, said Benjamin B. Wallace, an analyst at Westborough, Massachusetts-based Grimes & Co., which manages about $1 billion and doesn’t own Goldman Sachs stock. “If the Senate and the SEC and the Department of Justice would stop investigating them they could probably put it behind them.”
Goldman Sachs rose 12 cents, or 0.1 percent, to $150.53 in composite trading on the New York Stock Exchange at 12:06 p.m. It has dropped 11 percent this year, compared with a 1.5 percent gain for the 82-member Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index and a 7.3 percent advance for the S&P 500 Index.
Compensation Principles
At the meeting two years ago, as public outrage over Wall Street bonuses swelled following the government bailouts of financial institutions, Blankfein read shareholders a description of Goldman Sachs’s compensation principles. The principles included an emphasis on tying pay to long-term firm performance and avoiding multiyear guarantees.
Although the firm rebounded from the crisis to achieve record profit in 2009, earnings sagged last year and in the first quarter of 2011.
Goldman Sachs’s return on equity, a measure of how well the firm reinvests shareholder capital, dropped to 11.5 percent in 2010 from 32.7 percent three years earlier. While it still beats competitors including Morgan Stanley, whose 2010 return on equity from continuing operations was 8.5 percent, investors question whether the bank can achieve its former profitability.
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2 COMMENTS:
Poverty in America,
The Power Elites’ response–borrow and blow trillions to prop up the engine of their own wealth, the banks, borrow trillions from future taxpayers to maintain the current Status Quo, and devalue the U.S. dollar–have all failed to reflate housing or middle class incomes. Rather, these actions only succeeded in enriching the top 10% who own the majority of stocks. The prop-job in stocks has yielded a propaganda coup, as the Status Quo has successfully identified a rising stock market as “proof the recovery is here,” but this propaganda is starting to wear thin as 90% of the populace are realizing they are still poorer than they were three years ago.
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