It’s not April 1st, so this can’t be a huge joke… Wow, incompetence at its best.
After determining pay packages…. Via the NYTimes:
“I wouldn’t begin to say how much money you should make on Wall Street,” Mr. Feinberg said in an interview last week, as he prepared to slash pay for the top 25 earners at seven firms that received significant government aid. “I’ve never worked on Wall Street. I don’t claim to know the ethos of Wall Street.”
[snip]
“If any one of these people left, I would be very disappointed,” he said.
Whoops, on the same day as the NYTimes article – Via Business Insider and here:
As if we needed any proof of the fact that arbitrarily cutting salaries drives away top people.
It turns out that a quarter of the execs targeted by our new Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg jumped ship before their pay cuts were even finalized. [emphasis mine]
Where did they go?
To their old firms’ competitors of course where they can command market rates for their work.
No kidding? You mean that the marketplace works that that when the government sticks is grubby fingers where they don’t belong it leads to unintended consequences? So now, we the people effectively own these firms that are a shell of there former selves and are left with the managers who couldn’t get hired by the other firms. Excellent… If there was any doubt we are going to lose all of our “investment” it should be gone now.
Can we fire this incompetent czar? I’d like to have at least had the opportunity to vote for someone with a fricking clue. This guy doesn’t even know what the market rate is for a financial exec and somehow expects to arbitrarily slash pay and hope that they won’t change employers. That is change we can believe in. Of course, the message from the execs is keep your damn change, I’m out.
