Merrill Lynch (MER Quote - Cramer on MER - Stock Picks) Chairman and CEO John Thain has backed off a request for a bonus of as much as $10 million, according to media reports late Monday.
The Wall Street Journal and the cable news channel CNBC reported Thain would no longer seek a bonus from the brokerage, whose shareholders last week approved a deal to sell the firm to Bank of America (BAC Quote - Cramer on BAC - Stock Picks). Thain's bonus request, reported earlier Monday by the Journal, had some Wall Street observers confused, and others in an outright uproar.
The Street
Still, the gall, it's as if he was shamed into backing down. I still have some sincere outrage under the cut that is very similar to the outrage I've read elsewhere.
You read that right, John Thain insists he still deserves his bloated compensation package even after the Government has given his firm a huge hand out in the form of publicly funded aid. Our money.
Merrill Lynch & Co. chief John Thain has suggested to directors that he get a 2008 bonus of as much as $10 million, but the battered securities firm's compensation committee is resisting his request, according to people familiar with the situation.
Huffington Post
Harry Reid called it "chutzbah", I call it gall, I'm sure many here could come up with much better terms.
Thain has said he deserves a bonus because he helped avert what could have been a much larger crisis at the firm, people familiar with his thinking told the WSJ.
Oh, so it could have been a lot worse, right? Has he not been paying attention? According to the HuffPost article, Merrill Lynch lost $11.7 billion this year alone. And this is a drop in the bucket compared to the current thinking when it comes to the overall cost of the bail out, but really? As people lose their homes, they lose everything this guy thinks he's deserving of 10 million dollars?
The gall! The Nerve! The audacity...my goodness, isn't this the thinking that got us all fucked up in the first place? It's just a little bonus! I saved the company millions, I deserve that money!
Of course we've read about the concessions that the auto workers are taking in order to get Government aid as well as the CEO's. Many have asked why the financial industry didn't have to go through the same kind of scrunity that the car company's had to go through.
From Reid himself...
"The TARP program, from which Merrill Lynch has taken billions of taxpayer dollars, was designed explicitly to limit executive compensation, bonuses and golden parachutes. While American families struggle to keep their jobs and their homes, I question the chutzpah of asking for a $10 million taxpayer-subsidized bonus. Americans deciding which bills to pay this month just to make ends meet do not want their hard-earned money even indirectly spent rewarding executives from banks that are largely responsible for the economic crisis. I sincerely hope that Merrill Lynch rejects this request."
The Hill
I love when righties talk about "entitlements" and how the poor feel they are deserved some kind of support regardless of what they do. Well, this corporate entitlement program has gotten me quite ill. Who is to say they deserve this money? And how many here think Merrill Lynch will just hand over the money, no questions asked?
Am I bitter, yes, I am. I know many who are weighed down by the cost of student loans and they work in the public sector, they will never know what it means to make that kind of money and yet they are still indebted to our College loan system to pay this money back. There are programs of course for teachers in the k-12 system who teach in "disadvantaged" neighborhoods but not for the lawyer who can't find work or the Community College Teacher who teaches in South LA and will never have to worry about asking for his 10 million dollar bonus.
The gall indeed.
UPDATE - I wonder how many jobs Thain could save with that 10 million dollar bonus?
Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) CEO John Thain told Bloomberg that thousands of the company's employees will lose their jobs as part of the deal to be acquired by Bank of America (NYSE: BAC).
Information technology, operations and corporate functions will be the hardest hit, with commodities and fixed income unaffected. Merrill has already cut more than 5,000 positions over the past year and a half. Merrill currently has about 60,000 workers.
"We haven't mapped it out in terms of actual number of people, but we are committed to saving $7 billion across the combined platforms, and that will be a challenge,'' Thain said. "Between our two companies it will be clearly thousands of jobs.'
Source