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The 175 were the top 25 bosses at the seven firms that were partly nationalized after being bailed out by the Treasury Department. They are a pair of automobile manufacturers, General Motors and Chrysler; their consumer finance arms; an insurance conglomerate, AIG; and two giant banks, Citigroup and Bank of America. ABC's Jake Tapper calculated that the seven businesses received a total of $300bn from TARP. On average, these executive will be paid just one tenth of their base salary, with total annual compensation--including pensions, perks and bonuses--being cut in half.
ABC's Betsy Stark remarked that "all the banks have benefited and continue to benefit from the taxpayers' largesse," yet executives at the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase will not see a penny cut from their take home pay. "Wells Fargo received $25bn and has not paid it back," CBS' Sharyl Attkisson pointed out, yet its bosses will be "subject to lesser compensation losses." The rest of Wall Street, predicted NBC's Lisa Myers, "receives huge bonuses as if the meltdown never happened."
ABC's Stark reported that the executives taking the cuts "are worried about their businesses, worried about being put at a further competitive disadvantage. They are weak companies and are worried about getting weaker if they are not able to retain their top talent through rich pay packages." She cited an example of a banker being lured away from a $200K-a-year job at one of the seven firms with a $5m-a-year offer. Stark's arithmetic was off by an order of magnitude. This hypothetical five-million-dollar banker would be making $2.5m after the 50% cut, more than ten times more than Stark's imaginary $200,000.
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