When your company is staring at a $15 billion loss in the face, every dollar saved through cost-cutting and scrimping counts. That’s a big reason there’s so much outrage over the news that former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain signed off on some $4 billion in bonuses for top executives on the eve of the brokerage’s merger with Bank of America earlier this month. (My italics.)What? Someone on Wall Street was signing off on bonuses just a couple of weeks ago? And $4 billion dollars worth?
For at least a couple of months now, the word 'bonus' has become the a new taboo, uttered only in disgusted (or regretful) whispers in the back alleys of Manhattan (and beyond), rivaling in notoriety some of the worst racial epithets. Thousands in the country are suffering job losses, company closings, home foreclosures, etc. and John Thain has the gall to sign off on $4 billion dollars in bonuses to his top executives (likely including himself)?
How much of that was out of taxpayer bailout dollars from the TARP?
Thain completely lost sight (as many Wall St. CEOs have done) of the fact that as CEO he was a steward of Merrill Lynch -- invested with authority by a collective of stockholders to be responsible and prudent in leading their company -- and not King of All He Surveys, free to do whatever he pleases.
If there is any lesson to be learned from all this, it's that it's the CEOs who are supposed to be the Servants, and the stockholding public the Master, not the other way around.
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