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‘Pay Czar’ Kenneth Feinberg Releases Final Executive Compensation Report on Bailed-Out Banks

July 23, 2010

‘Pay Czar’ Kenneth Feinberg Releases Final Executive Compensation Report on Bailed-Out Banks

Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen

The Wall Street executives and top traders that sucked more than a billion dollars out of their firms while they were on the brink of insolvency should be ashamed. But they won’t be.
 
That’s why the lesson from the pay czar’s report is that we must have binding rules on Wall Street firms’ compensation. It should go without saying that bonus payments should not be made by firms on the verge of failure. Even more crucial is to set rules that eliminate these outsized incentives for executives and traders to engage in high-risk activities to generate short-term payouts for their own personal benefit without regard to the long-term consequences.

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Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit public interest advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.  For more information, visit www.citizen.org