In the News: We Have Seen the Light! 10 Banks Revealed and No Salary Caps
As a quick follow-on to yesterday’s post, here are the 10 banks that will be repaying TARP in the first wave. Morgan Stanley is on the list, so it looks like Mr. Mack has played his cards right and is on his way to bringing MS back to the top baby! Surprisingly, one of the banks that everyone expected to be running towards to the opportunity to pay back the TARP funds, Wells Fargo, is not on this list, which means either they have decided not to repay just yet, or they are not being allowed to repay just yet – hmm.
10 Big Boys Shoving the Government Dole
1. JP Morgan – $25 billion
2. Goldman Sachs – $10 billion
3. Morgan Stanley – $10 billion
4. U.S. Bancorp – $6.6 billion
5. Capital One – $3.6 billion
6. American Express – – $3.4 billion
7. BB&T – $3.1 billion
8. Bank of NY Mellon – $3.0 billion
9. State Street – $2.0 billion
10. Northern Trust – $1.6 billion
Part 2 of this post refers to Obama’s salary caps, or, should I now say, his lack thereof. The good news (as you can probably tell from the title): the proposed salary caps that team Obama was seriously considering have, thankfully, been squashed. The bad news: the broader regulations (more likely recommendations, which begs the question: how effective can recommendations really be?) that have not yet been fully described are barreling towards us as planned, and Congressional bonus restrictions will be fully supported by team Obama.
One aspect of the broad recommendations that has been hinted at involves appointing a “pay czar,” who will be in charge of monitoring the salary practices of those institutions that received (and still have) TARP funds. Geithner, in his usual merry way, is pushing to monitor all firms, not just TARP firms, to more closely tie incentive compensation long-term performance by paying bonuses in restricted stock, as opposed to the more traditional cash and stock plans (unless Timmy doesn’t know that most bonuses are paid cash up to a point, and then the rest in stock that has a vesting period). It all sounds very exciting and the full briefing is due out today/tomorrow.
