Everyone knows where I was Sunday the 11th, where the idea for this week's blog germinated, right? Right. I was at Borders, digesting Barron's.
Monday's edition of Barron's usually hits my mailbox on Saturday morning — my guess is that it's printed in Dallas and mailed to Tulsa on Fridays, maybe late at night? This week's issue was/is especially rich. One may find in its pages a quarterly listing of fund results by Lipper, and lots of good and not-so-good investment ideas.
Among the news, information and current (and estimated for the future) prices of stock, came a bit about how much yearly gold the nutty mental midgets of Wall Street take from their companies. Ye gods: as a value-oriented, executives-work-for-the-shareholders kind of guy, the info made my blood run cold.
The employees at Goldman Sachs (there's a reason, I guess, that Gold, yes, with a capital G, is in the name) managed to pay themselves 36% of revenues in 2009. I'm sure it would have been more, since it was 49% in 2008, had not the government shown outrage this year at 2009 "executive bonuses." Note that "revenues" word, meaning all the money the firm took in before taxes, expenses and all that other nuisance stuff that businesses pay each year were considered.
You think that's bad? Lazard had a whopping distribution of 80% of revenues. Morgan Stanley? A handsome 62%, government protestations be damned.
