There has been a recovery in this country – for the very top. Needless to say, it hasn’t trickled down to everybody else. CEOs are making more money than they did before the financial crisis and Great Recession. The typical pay package for the head of a company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 was [...]

The proposed increases to top marginal tax rates, as small as they are at a hike of just 4.6% on dollars above $250,000, really won’t have a major impact except at the very high numbers. Bank bonuses, for example, will end up costing the executives a fair amount more in taxes because of the dollar [...]

Zachary Goldfarb points to a little-noticed section of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that regulators could use to set limits on executive pay packages at the largest financial firms. The section 956(a) rules would apply to any financial firm with over $1 billion in assets. “The financial crisis made patently clear that the direct regulation [...]

Much like how the health care debate coincided with a last-minute failure on Medicare buy-in, the financial reform debate coincided with a last-minute failure on taxing the banks. Both of the policies were compromises – Medicare buy-in was the climb-down from the public option (and single-payer), and the bank tax inserted in the conference report [...]

Brian Beutler has a disturbing article about House conferees working inside the conference committee on behalf of the New Democrats and the New York delegation to kill or weaken key provisions of the Wall Street reform bill. Because of the conference committee’s complex rules, the Wall Street friendly House members negotiating the final bill have [...]

The claim from companies receiving TARP money was that they couldn’t lower pay for their executives because they would lose them to other companies offering more competitive salaries, whether stateside or overseas. This was always bunk, but now we have the stats to prove it – just 16 executives changed companies after Kenneth Feinberg instituted [...]

Amidst this make-or-break week on health care reform, Chris Dodd is prepared to release his financial reform bill, without Republicans on board but reflecting the work performed with Republicans over the last couple months. With 59 votes in the Senate, Democrats need support from across the aisle to overcome an expected filibuster, but that lone [...]

The White House went into major pushback mode on President Obama’s comments about bonuses and banking CEOs Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon yesterday. They offered the full context of the remarks and said that his line about “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth” was something he’s said many [...]

President Obama is scheduled to announce later today his intention to include in the budget a fee on major banks designed to recoup all losses from the TARP bailout. The tax on banks, insurance companies and brokerages with more than $50 billion in assets would start after June 30 and seek to collect $90 billion [...]

This was rumored previously, but the FDIC is now forwarding a plan to essentially tax banks (it’s a fee, but same diff) and encourage them toward better compensation practices: The FDIC, which collects fees from all banks to repay depositors in failed banks, is considering a plan to impose higher fees on banks with compensation [...]

France and Germany have signed on to a controversial one-time 50% tax on all banking industry bonuses. The momentum building up in Europe behind the clampdown on bonuses followed conversations between Treasury officials and those in G7 countries on Wednesday after the pre-budget report outlined the 50% tax on bankers’ bonuses of more than £25,000. [...]