While one can certainly question whether or not they earned these salaries (and I personally believe public servants should refrain from accepting raises — especially those at the top), this makes me far more angry:
When Feinberg announced his pay packages in late October, he found a way to give something to everyone. The public enjoyed a measure of revenge: Feinberg’s ultimate rulings looked hard-nosed when compared with what the executives used to make. Yet the leaders of these failed companies still ended up winning big paydays — an average of $6.5 million to each Bank of America executive and $6.2 million to those at Citigroup. Meantime, the Obama administration looked tough on fat-cat compensation, even as it quietly cajoled Feinberg to ease up on some of the restrictions he wanted to impose.
Knowing that Wall Street would be a pathetic shell of its former self without taxpayers’ and savers’ generous subsidies, it’s far more egregious that these banking executives are still making what they were making (or more!) during the most manic period during the bubble. At least public servants are doing something useful, especially the front-line public servants.
Let’s not get distracted from the root cause of our current problems: the FIRE sector and the politicians who pander to these institutions. Even if you add up all the wages, benefits, and pensions of all the public employees in the United States, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions that are being spent and wasted in the finace sector (in asset purchases, guarantees and artificially low rates, among other things).
