Friday, January 29, 2016

Just in case anyone thinks Wall Street has any self perception, I was reading the Wall Street Journal this weekend during the NYC blizzard and came across an interesting article. The article stated that head of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein and head of Morgan Stanley James Gorman had taken a pay cut this year. It seems that poor Lloyd and James will have to struggle through the winter with only 23 and 21.5 million respectively, which was one million less than last year. In what parallel universe can this be described as a pay cut? Are we supposed to think that these men are being punished by their companies? "Yes that will teach them" "If you don't get better next year you will only get 20 million"

Additional random snow bound thoughts:

With the drop in commodities world wide it will be extremely hard for the Fed to raise interest rates according to the schedule everyone expected this year.

The rating agencies (Moody's and S&P) still don't get it. Case in point, Moody's finally figured out that oil was dropping like a rock so just last week they announced they were going to review oil credits. Where have they been for the last year?