Top Obama administration officials sharply criticized Wall Street firms planning to pay big bonuses, pointedly contrasting the soaring profits some financial companies have recorded in recent days with continuing high jobless rates across the country.
The firms are benefiting from government efforts, some initiated by the Obama administration, to stabilize and restore confidence to the capital markets after a global financial crisis that began last year. With their fortunes rebounding, the Wall Street firms plan to pay tens of billions of dollars to executives.
On Meet the Press, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) slammed Wall Street firms that plan to hand out record pay packages this year — even after taking billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bailouts.
“Obviously when you see these bonuses being paid out it’s a source of outrage in the country, and it should be,” Dodd said. “What are these people thinking about at these companies?”
White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Sunday that investment banks should rethinking the seven-figure bonuses they plan to play.
“The American people have limited tolerance for this,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”
“They don’t begrudge success, and we ought not be in the business of micromanaging how companies compensate. But they ought to do the things that they should to help this country, and that’s lending … and that’s standing down on financial regulatory reform, letting us move forward on the reforms we need.”
Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Americans “have a right to be frustrated and angry” at reports that a year after the government used $700 billion to save major lending institutions from collapse, Wall Street appears poised to hand out another round of hefty bonuses.
Mr. Emanuel also scolded banks for turning around as soon as they became healthy and fighting against the regulations the president and his supporters in Congress deem necessary to head off the same kind of financial crisis in the future.
“The risks that they took, took the economy to a place, it was near a depression,” Mr. Emanuel said in an appearance on “State of the Union” on CNN, referring to the financial institutions.
“They have a responsibility to be part of the solution, not being the obstacle.”
Faster Read: I’m investing my bonus in a company that makes pitchforks.
Image by cliff1066.
