Obama on bank CEO bonuses

I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen. I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.

While an extraordinary amount of money for Main Street, there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.

~ President Barack Obama, "Obama Doesn’t ‘Begrudge’ Bonuses for ‘Savvy’ Blankfein," Bloomberg, February 9, 2010

BusinessWeek: Robert Rubin collects $118 million in pay at Citigroup

Even once-revered former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who, according to compensation data tracker Equilar, collected $118 million in pay between 1999 and 2006 while serving as director and senior counselor at Citigroup, has taken some heat.

~ BusinessWeek, "Bailout Money Could Have More Strings Attached," January 26, 2009

Paul Krugman blaming the subprime mess on greed and a lack of corporate governance

'What were they smoking?" asks the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine. Underneath the headline are photos of recently deposed Wall Street titans, captioned with the staggering sums they managed to lose.

The answer, of course, is that they were high on the usual drug - greed. And they were encouraged to make socially destructive decisions by a system of executive compensation that should have been reformed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, but wasn't.

The point is that the subprime crisis and the credit crunch are, in an important sense, the result of our failure to effectively reform corporate governance after the last set of scandals.

~ Paul Krugman, "Banks Gone Wild," International Herald Tribune, November 23, 2007