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Special Master Kenneth Feinberg granted newsmaker interviews to explain his decision to cut the pay of 175 executives at seven part-nationalized businesses. ABC's Betsy Stark asked whether he had "done right by angry taxpayers" at the same time as safeguarding those companies' "ability to compete." "I have tried to balance both sides," the bureaucrat replied. NBC's Lisa Myers pointed out that even after the cuts there will still be 34 executives at AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America whose annual pay will exceed $1m. ABC's Dan Harris repeated the scuttlebutt that General Motors is having trouble finding applicants for its vacant Chief Financial Officer position because "the salary is capped by the government at $1m."
Harris has to be kidding about a shortage of corporate accountants who want to be a millionaire. Admittedly his assignment was to focus on the talking points coming out of Wall Street in favor of leaving lavish remuneration alone. He repeated one worry that a bailed-out company might suffer a "brain drain" of defections. Mostly Harris was sarcastic about Wall Street's whining. In one paraphrase, he declared "we have to hold our nose and allow these big payouts to continue because to micromanage the banks would be to cut off our nose to spite our face!" How about this self-serving rationalization? "Americans need to learn to live with an ugly truth of capitalism that sometimes infuriating unfairness may be good for all of us."
CBS' Chip Reid added that salary caps will not only apply to Feinberg's top 175 executives. The Federal Reserve's regulation of the entire commercial banking industry will include caps on compensation packages not only for top executives but also for "any employee who could expose a bank to big risk, including some traders and loan officers."
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