Thread: US To Give $5 Trillion In Bankster Pay, Bonuses -Black Swan

Nassim Taleb: The American Economy Will Transfer $5 Trillion To Banker Pay And Bonuses Over The Next 10 Years

Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel, Project Syndicate
Sep. 2, 2011, 3:03 PM

Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb the author of "The Black Swan" and a financial philosopher

For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. In the United States, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion.

Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion, an amount vastly larger than what both President Barack Obama’s administration and his Republican opponents seem willing to cut from further government deficits.

That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools, and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees.

Such transfers represent as cunning a tax on everyone else as one can imagine. It feels quite iniquitous that bankers, having helped cause today’s financial and economic troubles, are the only class that is not suffering from them – and in many cases are actually benefiting.

Mainstream megabanks are puzzling in many respects. It is (now) no secret that they have operated so far as large sophisticated compensation schemes, masking probabilities of low-risk, high-impact “Black Swanâ€

USURY

The illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest.