Free Republic

AIB BANKERS WILL be paid €40m in salary bonuses this year – exactly six months after Brian Lenihan said: “We can’t go back to those mad bonuses.” The news that AIB is to hand out the massive Christmas bonus – averaging around €16,700 to each of 2,400 ‘key’ staff – has been greeted with derision in the week that €6bn of cuts and taxes were announced in Budget 2011. Yet only six months ago, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan gave an interview to the Sunday Independent claiming that banker fat cats would no longer be taking home huge bonuses while the...

A New York Times editorial slammed Goldman Sachs for its role in the financial crisis and said that instead of paying big bonuses to its employees it should make a multibillion-dollar gift to help reduce the U.S. national debt. The editorial, published November 21, attacked Goldman for everything from its top executive's failure to apologize properly for his investment bank's part in creating the crisis as well as Goldman's awarding of bonuses related to profits that the paper said were boosted by a government bailout. The Times sniffed at Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein's acknowledgment last week that his bank "participated...

Goldman Sachs employees can't help themselves when they see a buck. In the name of doing "God's work," Lloyd Blankfein apparently is going along with the GS is evil mantra and is going to screw GS shareholders and keep more GS money for himself and his GS top dogs. Despite record net income and compensation at Goldman, analysts expect its 2009 earnings per share to be 22% lower than in 2007. The decline is caused by GS issuing more than 100 million shares in the past year to bolster Goldman's financial position and capital. Major shareholders have said that reining...

The campaign to crack down on Wall Street bonuses was dealt a serious intellectual blow today when the winner of the 2006 Nobel prize in economics described attempts to blame misaligned compensation incentives for the financial crisis as "the most profound fallacy." Edmund Phelps wrote a piece critical of neoclassical and Keynesian responses to the financial crisis for the Financial Times today. It's a great takedown of both schools from a Hayekian perspective. But it concludes by delivering a hammer blow to those who want to blame the financial disaster on bonuses. From the FT: The most profound fallacy is...

Tadpoles develop deformed hearts and impaired kidneys and digestive systems when exposed to the widely used herbicide atrazine in their early stages of life, according to research by Tufts University biologists. The results present a more comprehensive picture of how this common weed killer – once thought to be harmless to animals -- disrupts growth of vital organs in amphibians during multiple growth periods. In recent years, worldwide amphibian population declines have fueled concerns over the potentially harmful effects of pesticides on "sentinel" organisms. Previous research had revealed negative effects of atrazine on amphibians extremely early and late in development....