NEW YORK - Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s investment bank, survivors of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, are set to pay record bonuses this year.
The firms, the three biggest banks to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program, will hand out $29.7 billion in bonuses, according to analysts’ estimates. That’s up 60 percent from last year and more than the previous high of $26.8 billion in 2007.
The money, split among 119,000 employees, equals $250,400 for each, almost five times the $50,303 median household income in the United States last year, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
The three will award more in stock and defer more cash payments under pressure from regulators to tie pay to long-term results, compensation experts said. They may still face public wrath over the size of bonuses.
“Wall Street is beginning to resemble Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in the film ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’ ’’ said Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate on compensation at the Portland, Maine-based Corporate Library.
The Fed said last month it will review the 28 largest banks to ensure that compensation doesn’t create incentives for the kinds of risky investments that brought the global financial system to the edge of collapse.
