Results tagged “fatcats”

The New York Times thinks so; the company's own payment rules bar execs from getting over $3 million in bonuses and 400,000 stock options. Yet publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and CEO Janet Robinson have both been paid under a plan that allows for $3.5 million in bonuses and over half a million stock options. Maybe that seems a tad excessive, but it's been a stressful year for the Times execs, what with all the staff cuts and ad losses they've sustained, so leave Pinch alone!

      

Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of people from different activist groups marched in the Financial District to protest the multi-billion dollar bailouts financial firms have received from the government as well as demand jobs for Americans who aren't financial executives. Bail Out The People organized the event, and spokesman Dustin Langley told Reuters, "This crisis is growing more dire everyday with so many people being kicked out of their home and jobs." Langley also told the Daily News, "An economic crisis isn't an AIG executive not having enough money to pay for his house on the Riviera. An economic crisis is all the American families that can't afford to put food on their tables."

Today, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo held a press conference on Wall Street, announcing his investigation of AIG's expenditures since 2007. You can read the letter he sent them here (PDF), but he does call their spending "unwarranted and outrageous" and asks the Board of Directors "to cease and desist any such further expenditures, and review, rescind, and recover all past unreasonable expenditures."

You'd think that after AIG was bailed out to the tune of $85 billion by the feds, executives would be morally chastened to watch their spending. But no: During today's testimony to the House Oversight Committee, the NY Times reports that a week after the bailout, "executives at its life insurance subsidiary, AIG General, held a weeklong retreat at the exclusive St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif. Expenses for the week, lawmakers were told, totaled $442,000, including $200,000 for hotel rooms, $150,000 for food and $23,000 in spa charges."