Goldman Sachs and Haiti

Anyone prone to thinking that investment bankers are geniuses should look at their catastrophically maladroit handling of the bonus issue this year. Goldman Sachs clearly thought they were exercising heroic self-denial by awarding themselves a compensation pool amounting to a mere $16.2 billion.

Haiti’s total GDP is $7 billion, and even before the earthquake one child in eight died before its fifth birthday; imagine Goldman turning over half its trough to Haiti in an attempt to change those numbers.

Instead they praised their own ‘restraint’ in awarding themselves only 36 per cent of their revenue in pay pool, down from the usual 50 per cent. News of these restrained bonuses came out the same day as Obama’s bank proposals. The Goldmaners must have been left wishing they hadn’t bothered.

The Great British Economy Disaster John Lanchester http://www.lrb.co.uk

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Banking, Haiti. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.