(Wall Street) Trader Pay Tops Brain Surgeons' and Shows Gap Weathers Crisis

[Pale Blue Dot]

Source: Bloomberg

Wall Street traders discouraged by declining bonuses this month can take solace: They still earn much more than brain surgeons and top U.S. generals.

An oil trader with 10 years in the business is likely to earn at least $1 million this year, while a neurosurgeon with similar time on the job makes less than $600,000, recruiters estimated. After a decade of deal-making, merger bankers take home about $2 million, more than 10 times what a similarly seasoned cancer researcher gets (see table below).

The pay gap between finance and other professions widened between the 1980s and 2006, exceeding the record set before the Great Depression, according to a 2009 study by Thomas Philippon, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. After the 2008 financial crisis, Wall Street started paying a larger portion of bonuses in stock and restricted cash. Yet there’s little sign the gap with Main Street is narrowing.

“I don’t think it’s healthy for the economy to be this skewed,” said Stephen Rose, a 63-year-old professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “I believe there’s some sort of connection between value added to the economy and pay. Everyone is losing sight of any fundamentals.”

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-13/traders-smaller-bonuses-still-top-pay-for-brain-surgeons-4-star-generals.html

[rfranklin]

1. A symptom of how deranged our economy is...

People who provide virtually no added value are the most highly compensated. The money obsessed have taken over.

[Nihil]

13. I'd question the word "virtually" in your statement.

> A symptom of how deranged our economy is...
> People who provide virtually no added value are the most highly compensated.
> The money obsessed have taken over.

I don't think that "virtually" comes into it at all - certainly not in the
subject of this thread.

[jimlup]

2. Well that's the magic of the "Market"

:sarcasm:

I guess the "Magic of the Market" is pretty good work if you can find it. It is certainly a self serving statement for the traders.

[jtuck004]

3. How do you get out from under them? Build an economy around them? n/t

[notesdev]

5. Take our government back from them

The reason why things are this way is that the finance industry owns our government lock, stock and barrel. This is why trillions of bailouts for them sail on through while everyone else gets to fight bitterly over the leftover scraps.

Did you know that 1% of our GDP is doled out in Wall St. bonuses alone? One dollar out of every hundred dollars of total economic activity is pure profit pocketed by the very same people who ran the economy into a ditch.

We need to take the power back. Who will be our champion?

[jtuck004]

7. A hypothetical - what if it was impossible to overcome a government

which had become so intertwined and interdependent on the financial sector - both the administration and congress?
Or even not impossible, but certainly difficult on a huge scale.

Is there a better way to save yourself than trying to "take power back", trying to garner all the votes that corporate money can buy.

Is there a flank to that?

[notesdev]

12. In a way

Come to understand that money is at the root of corruption. All these corrupt activities where you get the business end are motivated by money. Someone makes money by it and that's why they do as they do, regardless of any other justification given.

The easiest way for them to control you is through debt. If you owe, you must work to pay back or they'll make your life very unpleasant, as any person who has been through a lengthy jobless spell can probably attest. So a very important measure is to refuse to take on additional debt for any reason. No school, home, consumer goods, or other type of credit. Buy only what you can pay for without debt. If this means reducing your lifestyle, do it. Find ways to live frugally and without debt.

That's the main thing you can do to take your personal economic power back.

But the unalterable fact of the matter is that we're all stuck together on this planet. Ultimately there is no getting away while you live.

So reclaiming our political power is essential. If we do not we will eventually be reduced to slaves; surely the trajectory intended for us has been made clear by now - the end goal is the great masses of people being docile servants to a tiny, hereditary power elite.

The first thing to reclaim is the ballot box. Getting rid of electronic or any other non-absolutely, objectively verifiable voting method has to be a priority. To paraphrase Stalin, "he who counts the votes". There's not point to an election if there aren't hard and fast rules and an unquestionable outcome (and not "unquestionable" in the "not permitted to question" sense, but rather the "easily confirmed" sense).

The next thing to do is reclaim some rights. Specifically, First Amendment (speech, religion, association) rights as well as Second Amendment rights are the fundamental basis of our relationship to government in the American system. Some here will argue against gun rights, but in my opinion that's a defense that the people need to have - after all, you see how corrupt things are. They could and would round up people en masse if they saw profit in it, but the masses having the ability to defend themselves makes that so much more difficult as to make it unprofitable.

The third thing to do is to take on the financial system. Don't do business with a "too big to fail" bank - unless you are certain they are losing money on your business, then it's OK. But more than that, press at every opportunity to stop them from committing frauds. A good first step will be to stop mortgage/foreclosure fraud (search: "foreclosuregate", "fraudclosure", and similar terms). Educate yourself in their scams - and make sure everyone else knows what's going on, too. That includes your representatives!

You need to stand up and resist the corporate takeover of our essential humanity. The only out for you is the out for everyone - throwing off the chains of (debt) slavery and reclaiming our natural right to self-determination.

[girl gone mad]

14. So long as our financial elites control the regime that controls the currency..

it will be "MMT for me, but not for thee" as lambert http://www.correntewire.com/call_republicans_bluff#comment-187366">puts it.

Barring dollar revulsion, democracy may be the only possible solution.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

4. I'm thinking about how people like to complain about doctor's bills...

...not that they aren't justified in some cases; but why doesn't anybody complain about the fucking corporate leeches?

[Anakin Skywalker]

6. Stupid Americans! Why do you pay this much to speculators?

[GETPLANING]

8. A different kind of capitalism

There are two kinds of capitalism today. Industrial capitalism and extractive capitalism. Industrial capitalism makes things that people need (toasters and houses) or want (Lamborghinis and vacation homes) and employs people to make these things. Industrial capitalism is what makes the world go around.
Extractive capitalism is the kind of enterprise we have on Wall Street. Traders buy and sell imaginary assets, usually commoddities, currencies, or blocks of stock, in an imaginary universe contained entirely on the internet. They buy and sell the same imaginary assets thousands of times a day, marking them up or down by a penny or a fraction, skimming capital out of the economy for their accounts and DRAINING VALUE from the economy.
They employ no one, they make nothing, they add no value to anything but their own bank accounts.

Many people on Wall Street are followers of the Ayn Rand cult of objectivism, where the world is divided into the "producers" and the "parasites." The irony is, they don't realize who the "parasites" really are.

[provis99]

9. funny how people that produce nothing have the highest incomes.

Is there anything more useless of damaging to the security of the economy than Wall Street bankers and speculators? Have they ever produced a single product? Cleaned a single table? Fixed a single car?

Capitalism is fucked up.

[Fool Count]

10. Forget the traders, those are greedy selfish soulless

bastards. But can anyone explain to me why should a brain surgeon, someone for whom saving other people's lives is in the job description, should be making $600k?
What, if a brain surgeon only made $200k there wouldn't be enough takers for this job?

[dd2003]

11. i am confused

should they be making more or less?