With the uncertain state of the market, pay on Wall Street has clearly declined. The New York Times reports that overall pay on Wall Street is expected to slip 30 per cent reflecting the dismal financial results reported by industry standard-bearers Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. ""Contrary to popular opinion, bankers are people, enduring the human condition like other people. The industry is experiencing massive retrenchment, waves of redundancies, endless public criticism and repeated cutbacks in compensation levels," an investment banker told New York Times reporter James Stewart.
Maybe, but the bankers are still pulling in big money. Pay at Goldman Sachs might be down 15 per cent, but as The Wall Street Journal tell us, the average compensaiton there was $367,057. Now that's down from last year's total of $430,700 but it's still a lot of money. Certainly more than the median pay packet in America which is as low as $37,440.
So the bankers might claim they're doing it hard but they are well ahead of the rest of the population. As Charles Murray from the America Enterprise Institute argues, it all goes to show how America is now falling apart. "People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality. When Americans used to brag about "the American way of life"-a phrase still in common use in 1960-they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.
Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled."
Wall Street pay is the barometer of how the US is coming apart.
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