Wall Street bonuses are Robin Hood in reverse -- but one Robin Hood approves
Filed under: Economy
We all know that Wall Street's bad bets nearly brought the financial system to its knees last year. Then U.S. taxpayers footed the bill to bail out Wall Street -- taking on obligations potentially as high as $23.7 trillion, leading to a $1.4 trillion federal deficit, and $12 trillion in national debt. To me that's a kind of reverse-Robin-Hood action. Ironically, a New York City charity called the Robin Hood Foundation, which says it supports 200 poverty-fighting programs, is celebrating Wall Street's expected $140 billion 2009 bonus windfall.
The head of Robin Hood's response to the upcoming record Wall Street bonuses is "Hell yeah!" reports Bloomberg News. The reason for David Saltzman's enthusiasm is that Robin Hood claims it gets more than half of its annual $150 million in donations from the employees of investment banks, brokerage firms and hedge funds.
That is nice for the egos of the Wall Street denizens who attend the Robin Hood fundraisers, where they publicly signal their relative net worth as they bid in live auctions in front of their peers. But Wall Street has contributed plenty of pain to the average American -- 401(k) investors have watched the S&P 500 lose 22% of its value in the last decade and 15.1 million Americans are unemployed.
As Thanksgiving approaches, there may be some who can be forgiven for thinking that it would have been better if America had not stolen from the poor to give to the rich -- even if a 0.054% sliver of that $140 billion in bonuses ends up back in the hands of Robin Hood's charity recipients.Peter Cohan is a management consultant, Babson professor and author of nine books, including Capital Rising (due in June 2010). Follow him on Twitter.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-13-2009 @ 2:48PM
george godfrey said...
The government was the real culprit of this melt-down by influencing banks to lend to anybody.
A loan officer recently told me that they were told they had to accept "stated Income" only as proof of the borrower's earnings.
The community re-investment act and the total incompetency of Fanny mae and Freddie Mac, buying all these bad loans were enabled the wall street greed to grow and become out of control.
Barnie Frank oversaw this mess and did nothing.
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11-13-2009 @ 3:42PM
Sally said...
As usual, you have your facts WRONG. This giant Ponzi scheme took years to happen and the Republicans were in power for all but 2 of those years. Put the blame where it belongs on the REPUBLICANS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How many times have we watched George W Bush say ALL Americans should own homes? Get your facts straight idiot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11-14-2009 @ 5:18AM
Nancy said...
Barney Frank is actually even more responsible that that: he was (head of, I believe) the committee that actively insisted that low income people be assured these loans that all responsible parties understood these homebuyers could not afford! Frank knew, the banks knew, and the prospective buyers themselves should have known, too.. The only innocent parties in this mess are the hard working Americans who bought property they could afford, or didn't buy property at all, and who have worked to pay off their mortgage or rent.
11-13-2009 @ 4:01PM
Chuck said...
Sally you better look at your history idiot. The everybody should have a home started under Clinton and Barney Frank was the main mover of the damn move with the Banks and pressured the banks to make the bad loans. As usual you liberals just want to blame and don't really know the history to understand who to blame. So idiot calling comes home to those uninformed.
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11-13-2009 @ 4:54PM
Don said...
Hey, everyone should have a home, isn't that a basic human need ? Folks, if the only problem we had was defaulted mortgages we would be in great shape.
It's the F.....ing banks that leveraged the real estate market 40 times and then sold phony insurance to the tune of 500 trillion dollars on it. That is the real problem and it is far from being corrected. 23 trillion in bailouts is no match for the 500 trillion of derivavtives on the bank balance sheets. Who are they kidding, the system is broken and needs reset or rebooted if you will. That is the only meaningful solution and end to this mess. And think of this, it is only electronic zeroes on a computer system, let's have some imagination here.
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