You truly couldn’t make this stuff up. (Via Americablog, via Naked Capitalism, via the UK Times Online:
STAFF at Lehman’s New York office who helped to cause the world’s biggest corporate bankruptcy are to share in a $2.5 billion bonanza.
The bonus, which has been described by London staff as a “scandal” has been pledged by Barclays Capital, the British-based bank that last week acquired Lehman’s American operation and took on 10,000 staff.
The money has been “ring fenced”, which I assume means it has been somehow legally exempted from the reach of creditors. Apparently Price Waterhouse is not happy about this little bit of high finance, since it advanced over 4 billion to Lehman just hours before it failed, and would like to know why Barclay’s will be paying big bonuses instead of repaying creditors.
This is a taste of what we will be reading in the months to come. As we plunk taxpayer money down to bail out these geniuses, they will be paying themselves big bonuses, and folks like Paulson will be telling us that they are absolutely necessary if our free market system is to function.
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