How to Cover Wall Street

This subject is quite personal for me, since my wife, Stacey, has worked at Morgan Stanley since 2000. She is not an investment banker, nor an executive, so I’m not sure how these plans to cut bonus pay would affect her. She works as a researcher/analyst on asset managers, e.g. mutual funds. Morgan uses her work and that of her colleagues to recommend asset managers to Morgan clients.

Her research division had nothing to do with the high leverage that Morgan took on or its investments in mortgage-backed securities. Her division has continued to make solid, consistent profits for Morgan Stanley.

So if Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Bernie Sanders are talking about cutting the bonuses of EVERY employee at every financial institution that has received part of the the bailout money I couldn’t be more opposed to the idea. Is it fair to penalize thousands of people for actions they had nothing to do with? And it is more than likely that these employees will be penalized in some way (either by losing their job or receiving less compensation) by their employer without the hand of government getting involved (I get into this later).

Check out this interview Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently did with CNBC. At the 1:56 mark a host chimes in:

“Senator your proposal looks rather punitive and mean spirited…It’s one thing to say to take bonuses away, when you’re getting federal money, from the big brass, that got us into this mess, but you want bonuses deprived of every Wall Street employee…You want the secretary at Goldman Sachs not to get a $30,000 bonus that she could put back into the economy. And she did nothing wrong.”

The comments made by Barney Frank (D-Mass) have been kind of vague as to whether they would go after executive pay or the pay of every Wall Street employee. The one below calls incentive structure on Wall Street “perverse.”

“The incentive structure of the finance industry should be looked at closely,” says Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. He plans to hold hearings on Nov. 12 and Nov. 18 and says he will raise the subject of bonuses. “It’s a perverse structure if it’s heads I win and tails I break even.”

WTF? What is he talking about? I’ll admit that I’m not a big fan of Frank. It’s kind of scary to me that he’s the chairman of such a powerful House committee. But he’s also a total hypocrite. In the past election cycle, he received more political contributions from the securities industry ($192,000) than any other industry. He is doing the typical play we see in Washington all the time – denounce something in public, but support it behind the scenes.

But in the end, I think all of this is a moot point because these firms are already going through major cost cutting by laying off thousands of workers (Morgan Stanley announced job cuts today) and bonus payouts will likely follow. When Morgan had a couple of terrible years a few years ago, they erased bonuses for thousands of employees.

I agree with Greg that the negative economic impact on New York would be huge if bonuses were frozen for all Wall Street employees. But I think the companies will be cutting, or reducing, bonuses on their own. And all this talk by Frank, Sanders and other Democrats is nothing but populist bloviating.