Obama Criticizes Wall Street Bonuses
-
- January
- 29
President Barack Obama today ripped Wall Street for dishing out $18.4 billion last year, as Comptroller Thomas Dinapoli found yesterday.
Wall Street firms, even after being bailed out by taxpayers last year and producing record losses, were still able to find a way to dole out an average of $112,000 in bonuses to roughly 165,000 workers.
“That is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful,” he said.
Obama said the bonus figure was the same Wall Street bankers gave themselves in 2004, when times were going well.
Obama continued, “Part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint, some discipline and some sense of responsibility.”
“The American people understand we’ve got a big hole we’ve got to dig ourselves out of. They don’t like people digging a bigger hole even as they’re being asked to fill it up,” he said, working both ends of the metaphor.
“There will be a time for them to make profits and a time for them to get bonuses,” Obama said. “This is not that time.”
The comments also prompted a response from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who has been investigating Wall Street bonuses.
“Over the course of our investigation it has become apparent that while Wall Street melted down, top executives believed that, unlike the rest of the country, they still deserved huge bonuses,” Cuomo said. “That’s why President Obama’s remarks today are a welcome breath of fresh air and a healthy dose of reality for Wall Street. President Obama is exactly right when he calls these bonuses shameful and the height of irresponsibility.”
This entry was posted
on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 5:23 pm by Joseph Spector.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Print This Post
| 
Email This Post
Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
