Bonus Time Is Here Again-- Only Not For The American People

Barry Ritholtz' chart tells the story

The banksters and their lobbyists continue paying off members of Congress, Congress continues repaying them with our tax dollars in the form of more bailouts, and they keep rewarding themselves with bigger and bigger bonuses. This has got to stop.

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

...Critics of the bonus culture in the City said the dominance of a few risk-taking investment banks is undermining the efforts of regulators to stabilise the financial system.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman, said: "The investment banks more than any other institutions created the culture of excessive leverage, excessive risk and excessive bonuses that led to the downfall of the financial system. Now they are cashing in and the same bonus culture has returned. The result must be that we are being pushed to the edge of another crash."

The disgraceful trash Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley are calling the Senate Finance Committee's health reform proposal is just a thinly-disguised bailout for an Insurance Industry that everyone hates-- almost everyone. Corrupt politicians like Baucus and Grassley love the Insurance CEOs. They scratch each others' backs. Insurance Giants have spent $1,219,675,114 on lobbying Congress in the last decade-- but that doesn't count the $316,522,578 in direct payments to candidates and members of Congress. And I bet it wouldn't surprise any regular DWT reader to hear that some of the most violent opposition to single payer-- or even a compromise public option-- comes from the members of the Senate, like Baucus and Grassley-- who have profited the most from Insurance CEOs' generosity. Among the worst shills-- and this is just insurance cash, not the whole Medical-Industrial Complex, which is far more-- is this dirty dozen corrupt and sleazy characters:

John McCain (R-AZ)- $2,885,602
Ben Nelson (DLC-NE)- $1,210,299
Max Baucus (DLC-MT)- $1,182,613
Arlen Specter (D-R-PA)- $1,037,205
Joe Lieberman (DLC-CT)- $1,035,302
Mitch McConnell (R-KY)- $928,007
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)- $888,724
Kent Conrad (DLC-ND)- $825,337
Jim Bunning (R-KY)- $793,999
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)- $664,057
Kit Bond (R-MO)- $644,571
Dick Shelby (R--AL)- $637,748

And if you're worried about Blanche Lincoln, don't. She's gotten $462,383 out of them and this year she's #2 on the list of who the health insurance industry is financing.

Back to the banksters for a moment. Last week the banksters' man on the inside, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, looked at members of Congress and told them, with a straight face, exactly what they wanted to hear: "No one should assume that the government will step in to bail them out if their firm fails." As Gretchen Morgenson explained in the NY Times yesterday, talk is cheap. Its especially cheap when your audience is as scripted and full of shit as you are. Geithner was trying to "sell" Congress-- or maybe the public-- on the weak and ineffective bankster-approved remake of the financial regulatory framework. As Morgenson points out, "there’s precious little in the 88-page document about how the government will eliminate systemic risks posed by financial firms that aren’t allowed to fail because they’re simply too big or to interconnected to other important economic players here and abroad."

It's kind of ironic that we'll hearing this from the Obama Administration just hours after Rahm Emanuel shoved a $108 billion loan guarantee up Congress' collective rear end for European bank bailouts under the auspices of the IMF.

Rather than propose ways to shrink these companies and the risks they pose, the Geithner plan argues instead for enhanced regulatory oversight of the behemoths. This suggests the taxpayer safety net will be larger after our national financial train wreck, not smaller.

More than two years after the crisis began, “too big to fail” remains “too problematic to address” with anything other than more souped-up regulation. Given that earlier efforts at policing these entities failed so miserably, why should anyone think that a new-and-improved regulatory approach will fare better?