Bankers Getting Toxic Assets For Bonuses

from the two-birds,-one-stone dept

The various banks on Wall Street have a bunch of problems that they're dealing with right now, including getting rid of toxic assets on their balance sheet, properly compensating staff who are expecting big bonuses even in such a down year and figuring out ways to motivate staff to invest in good assets, even in such tough times. It appears that Credit Suisse Group may have come up with a creative solution to all of those things. Instead of cash bonuses this year, it's going to give employees some of those toxic assets it holds. This is incredibly creative for a variety of reasons. It starts to get some of those assets off the balance sheet. It gives them to employees who want bonuses, and it gives those employees quite the incentive to make sure those assets are actually worth something. Of course, since many of those employees recognize that the assets aren't worth much at all, many of them are pissed off, but it's pretty difficult to come up with any reason at all that they deserve any sort of bonus, so they're probably a lot better off accepting what they're given and seeing if they can actually make it worth something.

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