Logo

Salary Is the New Bonus

Published: May 27, 2009

 Finance       

In order to prevent more of their heavy hitting bankers from heading for the hills (a.k.a. to non-governmentally-patrolled waters), Citi and BofA plan to follow Morgan Stanley in boosting their bankers' base salaries, making up for the shallow, kiddie-sized bonus pools now available to their employees due to that pesky federal program called TARP.

Across the way, in Switzerland (the country formerly known as a tax shelterist's wet dream, now known as a tax shelterist's worst nightmare), UBS also said it plans to hold to its word of pushing salaries north, attempting to hold its ranks from handing in their resignations.

Meanwhile, back in Gotham, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are keeping their heads down, as well as their base salaries, hoping to repay the U.S. government as soon as possible and thus maintain their decades-old practice of paying VPs, MDs and the like in one-time checks with several zeros on the left side of the decimal.

Also of note today: the Times cites a study that basically says if you want to spend time with your kids or your spouse, go into medicine, not finance; and in an article in the current issue of The Brown Alumni Magazine, Meredith Whitney, the famous Brown alumnus and ex-Oppenheimer analyst who now runs an eponymous research firm, has some advice for would-be investment bankers: do it for the love, not for the big money. Because, she says, the big money's gone.

***