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Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein bagged a $14.6M compensation package.....including stock awards, which were also paid to other top executives. Blankfein also got a 230% bump in his base salary to $2M, up from $600,000 since 2007....excluding private jets, cars and other perks. CFO David Viniar, COO Gary Cohn and Vice Chair Michael Evans received identical boosts, with each hauling in $1.85M annually. Blankfein's pay in the halcyon days of 2007, was $67.9M. Other firms have been hiking base pay at a time when regulators are mulling new rules for Wall Street pay.

A 2004 study of the results of stock trading by United States Senators during the 1990s found that that Senators on average beat the market by 12% a year. In sharp contrast, U.S. households on average underperformed the market by 1.4% a year and even corporate insiders on average beat the market by only about 6% a year during that period.

Sounds like it to me. Interesting info out of FT: The Galleon hedge fund at the centre of an insider trading scandal paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year to its Wall Street banks and in return regularly received market information that would not have been disclosed to most investors, executives familiar with the matter say. A person familiar with Galleon, whose founder, Raj Rajaratnam, was charged with insider trading this month, said it paid about $250m to its banks last year. Executives who dealt with the fund said it paid more in fees and other charges during the...