Wretched Excess December 11, 2006 Jim Kunstler CNBC reports that fifty executives at Goldman Sachs will each receive bonuses of $25 million or more. Yes, you read correctly. $25 million each. And the reason, according to CNBC is that these sharpies would otherwise jump ship for hedge fund nirvana if not lavishly tipped. Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch also will each smack twelve employees over the head with golden stockings full of $25 million. Note, Goldman Sachs was rumored to have driven the price of oil down for the election season by applying huge sums of money to twiddle the futures market, and note, too, that the Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, was CEO of Goldman Sachs until the middle of last summer. But, of course, I am fond of saying that I am allergic to conspiracy theories. I do have another theory, though. I admit, it's just a hunch, a wild-ass guess, a twinge in the gut. It's that come 2007 New York's new governor, Elliot Spitzer, and the new state attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, will go after these grifters like a couple of mastiffs in a basement full of rats -- just like Spitzer went after Dick Grasso, the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, who, in 2003, received a "deferred compensation" package of $140-million, awarded by a hand-picked NYSE compensation committee composed of executives from the very listed companies Grasso was supposed to regulate. His venality unbound, Grasso then arranged to receive an additional $48-million when the embarrassed NYSE board made him step down from his job. Of course, this whole sordid tale raises some ineffable questions, such as, how exactly does one's standard of living improve after, say, the first $140 million? How many private jet planes does it take to summon up that certain glow of contentment achieved among the testosterone-for-lunch-bunch? Anyway, the Grasso case is currently awaiting trial. So far, the New York State Supreme Court issued a summary decision ordering him to repay "a significant amount" of the gazillions he walked away with. The cheeky Grasso countersued the NYSE for "besmirching his name." Well he can sue me, too, because I am here to tell you that Dick Grasso's behavior as fiduciary for a non-profit corporation should be heralded from sea to shining sea as the most disgraceful species of money-grubbing turpitude conceivable in a sentient creature above the level of a howler monkey. I hope he spends the rest of his life doing Chinese fire drills in the civil courts and finally dies by getting sucked into the air intake of the starboard engine of his private jet five minutes after the re-po man shows up with a warrant for chattal surrender. Excuse me. I am momentarily afflicted with the vapors. Let's just say that the inauguration of Messers Spitzer and Cuomo is but weeks away now, and leave it at that. Stay tuned. I have another, slightly different idea, though, in a another vein. Casual observers like myself have described the US economy as being in a hideous state of unbalance. On the one hand, we have the aforementioned Wall Street smoothies raking in unbelievable bonus fortunes, while the rest of the nation sinks into home equity quicksand wearing lead-lined suits manufactured in ARM mortgage reset hell. The afflicted house owners can't even sell their houses because the market is glutted with houses just like theirs, now worth less than the mortgages owed on them and, guess what, the supply of Greater Fools has finally dried up. Why doesn't the Wall Street bonus crowd, as a public service, step in and invest all their supernaturally-acquired dough in the suburban house market? To sort of even things out and prop things up. Since so much of their bonus dough was probably generated through the magic of mortgage-backed securities translated into hedges, carry plays, leveraged derivatives gambits, commodity shorts, credit default swaps, and other acts of financial legerdemain, then perhaps they owe it to salt-of-the-earth America -- the distressed home-owner middle class (not to mention the home-builders choking on oversupply of their "product") -- to step into the breach and pony up for some of those houses -- to prove that you really can base a post-industrial economy on real estate sales. Original

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