bonus culture Concepts

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

by Satyajit Das · 14 Oct 2011 · 741pp · 179,454 words

, sometimes related to the relative status of the parties. No doctor or surgeon expects to or receives a tip for doing their job properly. The bonus culture encouraged moral hazard—a focus on narrowly quantifiable outcomes while ignoring wider risks and costs. Elite bankers and traders took risks with other people’s

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

by Kurt Andersen · 14 Sep 2020 · 486pp · 150,849 words

lose what they had. But then, Cohan explains, “one Wall Street partnership after another became a public corporation. The partnership culture gave way to a bonus culture, in which employees felt free to take huge risks with other people’s money in order to generate revenue and big bonuses. Risk management on

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement

by Amy Lang and Daniel Lang/levitsky · 11 Jun 2012 · 537pp · 99,778 words

, Ambrose 197 Black Panthers 19, 195, 240 Blair Mountain rebellion 73 blocking 113-14, 129, 130, 141, 158 Bocafloja 65 Boggs, Grace Lee 57, 164 bonus culture 27, 49, 271 Boston, US 108-10, 125, 128, 148, 165, 271, 272-3, 275, 291 Brazil 20, 28, 277, 278, 282 Britain 70, 292

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought

by Andrew W. Lo · 3 Apr 2017 · 733pp · 179,391 words

narratives that may not be as accurate as they sound. NOT ENOUGH SKIN IN THE GAME? One popular narrative of the financial crisis blames the “bonus culture” of Wall Street for creating a climate of excessive risk-taking. Much of the public was outraged that executives in the financial industry received generous

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bonus had fallen to a meager 6 percent of its original value, and his 2006 option bonus expired, worthless. This is exactly how Wall Street bonus culture is intended to work. However, Murphy’s conclusion comes with an important caveat. His results only apply to the top level of banking executives—they

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. Did low-level employees of financial firms take excessive risks in pursuit of potential profit? As we’ve seen with rogue traders, the Wall Street bonus culture isn’t sufficient to prevent low-level employees from taking excessive risk; other forms of monitoring and risk management are needed. Here is a possible

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counternarrative, but one that will require further evidence to verify or refute. Despite its inaccuracy, this narrative about Wall Street’s bonus culture is difficult to dislodge from people’s minds, precisely because it conforms to people’s heuristic about how the world works. We’re prone to

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confirmation bias. If we believe that Wall Street wheeler-dealers are all crooks, this narrative about Wall Street’s bonus culture not only confirms this heuristic, but also reinforces it. More subtly, if we believe that “people respond to incentives”—the economist’s heuristic—we’ll

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market

by Philip Augar · 4 Jul 2018 · 457pp · 143,967 words

Liberal Democrats’ Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, who had been chief economist at Shell before entering politics, captured the public mood: ‘These people never learn. The bonus culture generated excessive and dangerous risk for the taxpayer and there is a real danger of this happening all over again.’2 The Treasury Select Committee

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. Barclays Annual Report 2011, pp. 20, 175 18. Today Business Lecture 2011, news.bbc.co.uk 19. ‘Financial crisis: the Bank of England’s surprising bonus culture’, Prospect, 11 August 2009 20. A Boardroom Row, 2012 1. Barclays Annual Report 2011, p. 14 2. Statement on banking by the Chancellor of the

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century

by Tom Bower · 1 Jan 2009 · 554pp · 168,114 words

of the Internet for information, and for always demanding answers, Dyer had a reputation for pushing to the edge but not beyond. Motivated by the bonus culture, his rivals were not enthralled. “He’s loaded the bullets in the gun in Cushing and he’s socking the rest of the world,” complained

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow

by Tim Jackson · 8 Dec 2016 · 573pp · 115,489 words

(bonuses) in the financial sector.33 Admittedly, this last concession was born more of political necessity in the face of huge public outcry over the bonus culture than through recognition of a point of principle. Within only a few months of the crisis, huge executive bonuses were being paid again. As early

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-11dd-8a4c-0000779fd18c.html. 34 See, for example, www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/17/goldmansachsexecutivesalaries (accessed 14 March 2016). Five years later, the bonus culture was still alive and well. Around 2,600 employees at British banks were paid a total of £3.4 billion in bonuses in 2013, an

Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story

by Greg Smith · 21 Oct 2012 · 304pp · 99,836 words

people on the trading floor, and I had many conversations about it with colleagues. People saw the hypocrisy but nobody did anything about it. The bonus culture was just too entrenched. The numbers themselves militated against change. There was a time in Goldman Sachs’s history when bonuses were very subjective. At

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters

by Diane Coyle · 21 Feb 2011 · 523pp · 111,615 words

. Bankers have even started to act as though, despite their enormous bailouts from taxpayers, they can get straight back to the high salary and high bonus culture. They seem to have an extraordinary psychological blind spot about the moral outrage their excessive incomes have caused. But their Gilded Age is over. Whether

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reality in the top 1 percent or even 0.1 percent of the income distribution were made to feel poor by the bankers.4 Banking bonus culture validated making a lot of money as a life and career goal. It made executives working in other jobs, including not only big corporations but

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Rock and, 1, 146; posterity and, 87; trust and, 145–46 banks, 2; bailouts and, 1, 88, 91, 99–100, 145, 267; Baker on, 244; bonus culture of, 87–88, 115, 139, 143–44, 193, 221, 223, 277–78, 295; capital reduction and, 256; competition and, 277; Economy of Enough and, 22

Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America

by Greg Farrell · 2 Nov 2010 · 526pp · 158,913 words

his wife and kids before everything else. Alphin came to view Thain’s focus on money as symptomatic of Wall Street’s out-of-control bonus culture. Taken in narrow terms, Thain was right to ask for a certain level of compensation. But nobody in New York seemed to understand the bigger

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Charlotte because of their own self-inflicted wounds. The whole reason John Thain worked for Ken Lewis, and not the other way around, was that bonus culture they had up there in New York. And even Thain, with all his degrees from Harvard and MIT, couldn’t see it. That’s what

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a rogue trader, he was far closer to being the model employee of the recent boom era. He was a product of Wall Street’s bonus culture, which rewards employees according to how much revenue they produce for their firm. He rose quickly at Merrill Lynch because he demonstrated an uncanny ability