About Bonuses....

After a little bit of goading, I finally decided to rise to the bait about making bonus recipients and amounts public for companies that received bailout cash.

Frankly, I started out absolutely bipolar on the subject. One part of me remembers the years at Citibank when, regardless of what I had done for the bank that year, there was no bonus at all. In fact, it seems in retrospect that the more I produced, the less likely I was to get a bonus at all. It occurred to me that I would have been embarrassed to admit that I did NOT get a bonus, never that I had received one. The subject never really came up. We didn't discuss bonuses in those days. However, I also remembered that bonuses in those days were not intended to be part of basic compensation -- as they were for my wife, who worked for an investment banking house, and who always felt that she was under-compensated (probably because of her gender).

The other part of me was filled with righteous populist indignation. I don't need to rehearse all the arguments raised in this camp. They're pretty compelling, too. Furthermore, I'm led to believe that the old scruples about discussing bonus amounts are pretty much gone in most of the financial community.

Finally tipping the balance for me was a post I saw on Facebook, wherein the poster declared that publicizing bonus recipients and amounts would be wrong because it might put spouses and other family members at risk of populist rage. With Lou Dobbs stirring this pot vigorously every evening on CNN, I have to concede that it's possible!

However, where I finally came out on this was here: if a bonus recipient had clearly demonstrated modesty and a great desire for privacy in his/her earlier career (i.e. before 2008), then they ought to be able to continue to have it. On the other hand, those who made no effort to hide the fact that they were obscenely wealthy; in fact, were ostentatiously obscenely wealthy -- have no real claim of a right of privacy now that being ostentatiously obscenely wealthy has lost its cachet.

Did the ostentatiously rich worry that their spouses might be victimized by kidnappers or blackmailers when greed was good? No? Then why should a new-found concern for their spouse trump the public interest today?

Ultimately, we're all accountable for what we've done, even if the wind is coming from another quarter now. It seems to me that it's only fair to let the chips fall where they may.