We tried to determine what Lloyd Blankfein earned in 2012 and came up with more than one number. We finally settled on $21 million but that turned out to be incorrect. Now we find out that he made $26 million in salary, stocks and bonuses.
Canadian bank executives are pikers by comparison to Blankfein but you can be sure they will be doing everything they can to catch up including making acquisitions and mergers at every opportunity. Of course, they can leverage for derivative action, too, and no one will even be any the wiser.
Goldman Sachs CEO rakes in $26 million in 2012
Surprise! An analysis of bank CEO pay for 2012 reveals that executives make a lot of money--and many are overpaid.
By Katie McDonough - Salon
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was paid, including salary, stocks and bonuses, an astonishing $26 million in 2012, making him the highest paid North American CEO in finance for that year, according to a new report from Bloomberg Markets magazine.
Joining Blankfein at the top of the list is John Stumpf of Wells Fargo, who took home $19.3 million. Overall, bank executive compensation increased 7.7 percent over the last year, according to Bloomberg.
When reached for comment, Goldman, naturally, suggested that it was very normal to award Blankfein a 73.7 percent compensation hike. “We strongly believe in linking executive pay to performance, and the variability of executive pay at the company over the past few years is a testament to that,” Goldman Sachs spokesman David Wells told Bloomberg in an e-mail. “We believe that our own framework for linking pay to performance provides a more reliable and thoughtful reflection of how best to compensate senior leaders than the methodology used for this exercise.”
But Bloomberg calculates that Blankfein’s “performance pay” may be overblown, placing him third in its ranking of most overpaid CEOs:
Read the whole article here
Read about Canadian bankers pay here
