Big Bank CEO Who Makes $23 Million Says Press Should Stop Focusing On Bank Compensation… Because Reporters Are Overpaid?

from the i'm-rubber-you're-glue dept

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who made approximately $23 million last year, apparently doesn’t like the press picking on the salaries at big banks like his. So, he’s telling them that they’re the ones who are overpaid. To be fair, the context is that he’s mocking reporters for focusing on the compensation ratio statistic that some have brought up in questioning how much banks pay their employees, by noting that the same ratio — which he rightfully calls a “stupid ratio” — doesn’t necessarily look good for the newspaper industry either. Of course, most journalists just buzz right by that context and point out how ridiculous it looks for Dimon to complain about how much journalists make, coming from where he’s sitting:

Dimon himself took home roughly $23 million in 2011, about the same as the year before, according to Bloomberg. Compare that to newspaper reporters, who earn an average salary of $43,780 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or between $20,000 and $60,000 per year according to Payscale.

For fun, let’s just compare a bit more. The average reporter at The New York Times earns about $93,000 per year, according to Glassdoor.com. The New York Times Company reported an operating profit of $56.7 million in 2011.

Dimon’s salary not only dwarfs that of us media-folk; he’s also making millions more than most of his employees. The average JPMorgan employee made $341,552 last year, according to Bloomberg News.

The key point, here, is really that if you’re trying to convince the press to stop focusing on stories about reasonable employee pay, you probably should not then directly state that their pay is “just damned outrageous,” while then defending bank employee payments by saying, “We are going to pay competitively…. We need top talent, you cannot run this business on second-rate talent.” The implication that the press gets from that — perhaps on purpose — is that the media shouldn’t pay competitively, doesn’t need top talent, and can run its business on second-rate talent. Some might argue that’s already the case… but it’s unlikely to get those “second-rate” reporters to drop the issue…

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Comments on “Big Bank CEO Who Makes $23 Million Says Press Should Stop Focusing On Bank Compensation… Because Reporters Are Overpaid?”

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31 Comments
fogbugzd (profile) says:

The ubber-wealthy are completely out of touch.

Fortunately the super-rich are not lonely because they have a club that includes several Nascar team owners. Mitt Romney is the current president of the club which traces its origins back to its founder, Marie Antoinette. The club is currently considering changing its motto to “Let them drive two Cadillacs.”

Anonymous Coward says:

Good God

Actually, I’d argue that they’re QUITE good at what they do. They manage to keep up this scam of a business running out in the open taking billions (trillions?) of dollars while it’s public knowledge that they take from us, the gov’t, and break every law they can (well, break, or pay to get rewritten) to do so. It takes a certain level of talent to be quite that evil, successfully.

They just don’t do anything that’s good for us, this country, or this world.

Josh in CharlotteNC (profile) says:

Re:

he was gonna sink HP to the bottom, and for that he got paid a 13 million bonus,

That’s the problem as I see it. I don’t have an issue with sky-high executive pay if the company is successful, expanding its business, treating its employees well and so on. I do have a problem when executive pay is high and the company is failing, not adapting to new markets, paying employees poorly or laying them off – and even worse are golden parachute clauses in contracts where a CEO can destroy the company and walk away with millions of dollars.

Roger Healey says:

Dimon is right

Journalists are overpaid. They’re useless. When they ask you questions, they always think they are being so clever, and they already have made up their minds before they even do the interview. If you give them some information that doesn’t support their pre-determined thesis, they just leave it out of the story, but if you agree with their point, they print it. This has happened to me many times in my 20 years of dealing with the press, so I just don’t talk to them anymore.

Chargone (profile) says:

Holy Jebus!

you’d then lose it all to lawsuits and corrupt regulatory practices. daring to compete with monopolists who own the regulators doesn’t end well unless you have some special edge.

(amusingly, we have a phone company that’s started up comparatively recently(last few years) here, only does mobile so far as i can tell, seem to have used a similar bit of logic. they’re Rapidly gaining customers at the expense of the old networks, AND were the only one to stay functional, if a bit funky, during the Christchurch Earthquake. (by funky i mean: you’d send a text and it would take an hour or so to turn up then show up three or four times over the course of the day. compaired to the other networks where it was ‘try to send a text. your phone fails.’))

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