No rules for bank bonuses
Posted Jul 31 2009, 02:10 PM by Kim Peterson
New York's attorney general is going after Wall Street again, this time spending nine months analyzing the screwy bonuses paid out by banks and other firms. The result? There's no rhyme or reason to how bonuses and other pay are awarded.

Banks like to say that employees are paid on performance. So what happened last year, when performance was nothing short of disastrous?

"When the banks did well, their employees were paid well," a report on the investigation states. "When the banks did poorly, their employees were paid well. And when the banks did very poorly, they were bailed out by taxpayers and their employees were still paid well."

This is probably not a surprise to most of us, but it turns out that bonuses and overall pay didn't really change as bank profits disappeared