Blankfein: No one will ever mistake Lloyd Blankfein for a pauper. But compared to his equals on Wall Street, the Goldman Sachs chief executive is looking downright ascetic.
The fill-in-the-Blankfein bonus guessing game ended with a seven-digit figure instead of the $100 million rumored payout. Goldman's board awarded Blankfein and his fellow top brass $9 million each in restricted stock units for their work in 2009. The units don’t start converting into regular shares until 2011 and can't be sold until 2015. Just as significantly, there's no cash in the mix. While it's a lot of money by any normal standard, the Goldman boss looks relatively underpaid by some measures.
Add in his $600,000 salary and he’s still making less than many of his own employees, below the average pay of an S&P 500 company chief executive in 2008 (the latest year for which data are available) and seven times less than the 2007 version of himself when he delivered equally eye-popping shareholder returns and took home $68 million.
Slice it another way and the relative austerity remains. Jamie Dimon is receiving $16 million in stock and options — and the JPMorgan boss delivered an 8 percent return on equity last year compared to Goldman’s 23 per cent. Morgan Stanley’s new chief James Gorman stands to get a nearly identical payday to Blankfein even though his firm lost money in 2009. Even the bosses of busted financial institutions like AIG and GMAC got approval from President Obama’s pay czar to be paid more than Blankfein. The calculation in paying Blankfein less than he arguably deserved is that the board can deflect the criticism — accompanied by potentially punitive legislation — that its chief profited unduly on the back of taxpayer support. Yet Goldman itself doesn’t seem fully convinced its comparative parsimony will be sufficient to quell the torch and pitchfork crowd. It saved the most anticipated news on Wall Street for a Friday evening.
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