Crisis, but not for bank billionaires

By Pat Garofalo in the USA:

Bank CEO Pay Grew By 12 Percent Last Year, While Worker Wages Near All-Time Lows

Jun 25, 2012 at 12:00 pm

According to an analysis by the pay research group Equilar, compensation for top bank CEOs grew by nearly 12 percent last year. The Financial Times noted that these increases occurred “despite widespread falls in profits and share prices“:

Top US and European bankers, including JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, have enjoyed double-digit annual pay rises averaging almost 12 per cent, despite widespread falls in profits and share prices, Financial Times research shows. […]

The analysis of total pay awarded to 15 bank chiefs by Equilar, a US pay research group, shows they received an average 11.9 per cent pay rise last year to $12.8m, the second increase in a row. …

Bankers such as Brian Moynihan at Bank of America, Citigroup’s Mr Pandit and JPMorgan’s Mr Dimon enjoyed the largest gains.

Britain: Cartoon: RBS and NatWest bank system failure: here.

Are Banksters Redeemable? Interview With Former JPMorgan Director John Fullerton. Laura Flanders, The Nation: “John Fullerton is a former managing director at JPMorgan. Finance drives economics, he says, and economics largely determines the fate of the planet, yet the resources of the planet are finite. ‘The notion that exponential growth can go on indefinitely in a finite planet is in violation with arithmetic and basic physics.’ As long as growth is the sine qua non of market economic ideology: ‘We are lost'”: here.