Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Attorney General, was investigating the banking financial crisis and has recently released his findings for the original 9 banks that received government funds to bail them out of ruin.

Every taxpayer who reads the report should be angered by it. In a time of financial crises, the banks “good ole boy” system rewarded thousands of execs with multi million dollar bonuses so they could keep up their lush lifestyles through the financial pinch. WTF?

In Citigroups case.. the bank reported losses of 27 billion plus or $5 plus a share to stock holders, yet Citigroup paid execs over 5 billion in bonuses. So where did the 5 billion come from? most likely the 45 billion from taxpayers.

Meryll Lynch got 10 billion in help, lost 27 billion and paid 3.6 billion in executive bonuses

Goldman Sachs 2.3 billion in earnings, 4.8 billion in bonuses and 10 billion in bail out funds

Anyway, sure we all see the trend. Banks droping like flies? I wonder why? Doesn’t every company pay bonuses in excess of earnings? What, stockholders actually expect a return on investment?

Andrew Cuomo had this to say in respect to the US banking system paying for failure.

“There is no clear rhyme or reason to the way banks compensate and reward their employees. In many ways, the past three years have provided a virtual laboratory in which to test the hypothesis that compensation in the financial industry was performance-based. But even a cursory examination of the data suggests that in these challenging economic times, compensation for bank employees has become unmoored from the banks’ financial performance.”

The following numbers are the banks that received taxpayer dollars and the bonuses that they paid out to their execs after getting the money.

The first number is bonuses over 3 million, second is 2 million and third is 1 million.
B of America 28 65 172
Bank of New York Mellon 12 22 74
Citigroup 124 176 738
Goldman Sachs 212 391 953
J.P. Morgan Chase over 200 - 1626
Merrill Lynch 149 - 696
Morgan Stanley 101 189 428
State Street 3 8 44
Wells Fargo 7 22 62

The Wall Street Journal did publish individual numbers for the various banks. Below is B of A and how much money they received, their reported earnings and bonuses. B of A reported earnings of 4 billion, got 45 billion in taxpayer bailout money, then paid 3.3 billion to execs in bonuses for a “job well done“?

Tarp funds received: $45 billion ($15 billion on the Capital Purchasing Program on Oct. 28, 2008, $10 billion on Jan. 9, under the Capital Purchase Program for Merrill Lynch; $20 billion on Jan. 16 under the Targeted Investment Program).

2008 Earnings: $4 billion, or 55 cents a share.

2008 total bonuses: $3.33 billion in cash and stock ($2.9 billion of the mixed cash and equity bonuses were discretionary, and $337 million were guaranteed).

Top four recipients received a combined $64.01 million.

The next four received $36.85 million.

The next six received $31.39 million.

Number that received more than $10 million: 4

Number that received more than $8 million: 8

Number that received more than $5 million: 10

Number that received more than $3 million: 28

Number that received more than $2 million: 65

Number that received at least $1 million: 172

Total work force: 243,000.

the full report