Wall Street employees to receive a record $140 billion in pay, bonuses

The average compensation per employee with these 23 firms will be $143,000, an increase of almost $2,000 per person.

Goldman Sachs employees will earn an average pay of $743,000 this year, just about double what they earned last year at $364,000, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

AIG employees received $168 million in “retention bonuses” in December 2008 and March 2009. These bonuses keep coming up as a point of contention as AIG has received $180 billion in tax payer money to keep their doors open.

Neil Barofsky, special inspector-general for the $700 billion troubled assets relief program (TARP), says in a report that about 400 employees of AIG’s Financial Products unit, which had brought the firm to its knees, shared the more than $168m in retention awards.

The recipients included a kitchen assistant, who was handed a cash retention bonus of $7,700, and a “file administrator,” who received $700, as well as more senior executives who were paid bonuses of up to $4m. In all, approximately 62% of AIG employees received a retention award of more than $100,000!

Barofsky says that the Treasury department did not understand AIG’s “byzantine pay structure” when it gave the firm the billions in bailout funds last fall.

The retention awards and bonuses that AIG continues to pay its employees is perhaps the biggest point of contention for most of the world. It has been suggested that these same executives who are receiving these bonuses were largely responsible for bringing the world to the brink of financial collapse.

As December draws near, and the pay structure of AIG still calls for more bonuses to be paid, the drama over millions in bonus money for executives at bailed-out companies is being revived again today on Capitol Hill.

Written by Shelby Bateson