Putting Merrill’s $4 billion in bonuses in perspective

by philg

Merrill Lynch executives wrote themselves $4 billion in bonus checks for their work in 2008, on top of already lavish salaries. All of this money is coming from the U.S. taxpayer through the TARP program, as previously discussed here. Looting $4 billion might not sound like that big a deal next to the $700 billion being thrown down the TARP drain, but how does $4 billion compare to other federal expenditures? Let’s look at some of the stuff the Feds typically do with $4 billion…

  • fund all National Science Foundation research for nearly one year (total 2008 research spend was $4.8 billion)
  • fund the National Park Service for almost two years (2008 budget $2.4B)
  • fund the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and its accident investigations on land, air, and sea for approximately 50 years (2008 budget was $79 million)
  • fund the Drug Enforcement Administration for more than two years (2008 budget $1.8B)
  • fund the FBI for about 8 months (2008 budget $6.5B)

Now that Wall Street generates only losses, can the U.S. taxpayer afford to take over responsibility for paying Wall Street executives their boom-era salaries and bonuses?

2 thoughts on “Putting Merrill’s $4 billion in bonuses in perspective”

  1. ‘entitlement’ is thrown around a lot in terms of union excess or of a pensioner’s need for support or of old-age benefit (Soc Sec). Yet, who has a bigger problem than those who are supposedly the best-and-brightest? Actually, if they were so smart (and measuring by wealth is suspect for several reasons), they would work something harder than those things related to casino capitalism.

    Related story: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Wall-Streets-culture-of-apf-14144436.html

  2. And that is not all. Citi reportedly signed up for a $50 Million Dassault Falcon 7X jet after taking billions of dollars of taxpayers’ bailout money. Thankfully Obama administration put enough pressure on them that they announced delivery cancellation the next day. This will still force them to pay several million dollars of penalty to Dassault though as the jet was originally ordered in 2005, and Dassault only custom builds each jet with guaranteed staged payments.

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