40 BILLION FOR INCOMPETENCE

The WSJ ran a story this morning that the major financial institutions at the heart of the world's financial crisis owed their top executives approximately 40 BILLION dollars in deferred compensation and pensions WSJ.com This would be on top of the outrageous sums paid to them already in salary, benefits and overly generous stock option grants.  For some firms, the amounts due the top executives exceeded the entire amount owed to all of the other employees.  Never have so few been paid so much to generate outrageous sums to themselves while causing so much harm.   Never before has so many been paid outrageous and unconscionable sums for such an incredible degree of stupidity and incompetence.  Henry Waxman sent a letter to these major institutions wanting more information about spending or allocating 108 billion on employee compensation for the first nine months of 2008, about the same as in 2007. washingtonpost.com  So, the question is how much of the $125 billion just received by these banks have gone to keep pay at the same levels or to even increase it for some of the already overly generously compensated individuals.