I admit to having this fascination with the huge bonuses being doled out to Wall Street executives. Each day brings a new record. And it rings so Marie Antionette--48 million people without health care, pensions disappearing, wage growth puny if at all...and, in the face of all that, a few folks are just piling up gargantuan rewards. It's bizarre, weird, sick and disturbing.
A few days ago, when I wrote about the $16 billion bonus money Goldman Sachs was going to dole out, no one yet had any firm figure on what the individual hauls might look like. Well, take a bow, Lloyd Blankfein--you just went into the record books:
Goldman Sachs paid Lloyd C. Blankfein, its chairman and chief executive, a bonus of $53.4 million in 2006, the highest ever for a Wall Street chief executive.
Added to his $600,000 salary, the bonus means that Mr. Blankfein will make $54 million this year, up from $38 million last year. The bank’s compensation committee awarded him $27.3 million in cash, $15.7 million in restricted stock and options to buy Goldman stock valued at $10.5 million.
The payout comes a week after Goldman reported a record profit of $9.5 billion, or $19.69 per diluted share, in 2006. Its stock price is up almost 60 percent for the year, and the firm’s market capitalization is nearly $90 billion, more than triple its value when it went public in May 1999.
No word on how much Lloyd is turning over to charity.
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