… the administration continues to balk at introducing any legislative curbs on Wall Street salaries. Paulson, who earned up to $30m annually when heading Goldman Sachs, said compensation was an issue to be dealt with separately.
“I’ve heard your concerns on executive compensation and I share those frustrations,” he said, adding that he was equally “upset” by certain examples of excess.
I’ve been trying to find a word, or a phrase, to describe the hideously inappropriate levels of compensation provided to people in certain jobs. That Henry Paulson isn’t the most generously remunerated person in the history of banking stinks. That, judging from his comment, he doesn’t consider consider $30 million a year excessive reeks. Thirty million dollars a year? I can’t understand how a person’s contribution can valued at $30 million annually; I’m trying to imagine a company budget sheet where one of the salary variables, when replaced by $30,000,000, returns a result that represents the best possible use of $30,000,000. It’s beyond my capacity, as a pathologically lazy person, to believe that a salary of this magnitude would provide any incentive for the person receiving it to do a good job for longer than, say, a year. I know that if my employer told me that I’d receive $30 million in the next financial year, I’d be planning my retirement. In fact, I’d probably try to do them a deal – say, $10 million for six months?
I know that these extraordinary (can I use the word “extraordinary” when, in fact, these obscene amounts appear to be quite ordinary in certain circles?) salaries are made up of bonuses and stock options and other things I know absolutely nothing about, but even taking that into consideration, the weekly/monthly paycheck must certainly inoculate the recipient against the sorts of concerns that harry the average person. For someone who has revelled in the largesse of an investment bank to then be in charge of the US Treasury, officially styled a “public servant”, and in a position to determine how the money of the average taxpayer might be spent on bailing out an economy run into the ground by people in his former profession seems absurd.
Maybe “paulson” is an appropriate (pejorative) adjective for ludicrously large sums of money.
