Goldman Sachs bonuses eclipse their $12.5 billion capital injection

Wow.  From the Daily Mail (via Naked Capitalism):

“The struggling Wall Street bank has set aside £7billion for salaries and 2008 year-end bonuses, it emerged yesterday.

Each of the firm’s 443 partners is on course to pocket an average Christmas bonus of more than £3million.

The size of the pay pool comfortably dwarfs the £6.1billion lifeline which the U.S. government is throwing to Goldman as part of its £430billion bail-out.”

I had posted about compensation at financials here and wondered what portion of the compensation was actually comprised of bonuses (which, you’d think, would be tired to the company’s performance and individual performance and not strictly obligatory).  Well now we know at least in the case of Goldman Sachs.

Yves comments more about how this cut compares (or doesn’t) to the cuts experienced at the end of the tech bubble.  I have no insight into that, so please visit Naked Capitalism.

I find it hard to blame GS too much though, if they were among the institutions that actually did not want the capital injection.  Though considering how gentle the terms for the capital injection were compared to the deal GS struck with Goldman Sachs, I’d find it hard to believe they would be too adamantly against the funds.

And how about those compensation limits that we’ve been talking about enforcing?  Even the facade of limited compensation didn’t last a month.

… and the cow goes moo