Via the NY Times:
In response, Mr. Ford has said that he supports a system of pay in high finance that rewards profits and punishes poor returns. "I believe that people take risk, and there are rewards if they do well; they should lose if they don't," he said in an interview several weeks ago.
As a vice chairman at Merrill Lynch, however, Mr. Ford benefited from an unusual arrangement that paid him generously regardless of how he and his firm perform. In 2007, he began working at the firm under a contract that guaranteed him annual compensation of at least $2 million, according to two people with direct knowledge of the deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agreement is confidential. With a bonus, his pay could well exceed that figure.
His guaranteed pay was twice that of the Merrill Lynch chief executive who hired him, E. Stanley O'Neal. Mr. O'Neal's contract assured him a base salary of $700,000, with the rest of his compensation not guaranteed, and paid out only as a bonus, records show. In some years that bonus was quite large. In 2006, for example, Mr. O'Neal's bonus was $18.5 million in cash and nearly $27 million in restricted stock, according to Equilar, a compensation-research firm.
Boy, it must be nice to get a job you're unqualified for, and where you don't appear to need to actually DO anything, in exchange for $2 million dollars a year and God knows how much for a bonus.
I wonder how many New Yorkers, put out of a job by the financial meltdown created by Harold Ford and his employer, and made possible by the policies of unregulated greed and theft that Harold Ford supports, would love to have even one one-hundredth of the deal that Ford has--even just to have a stable job where they could ply their talents in exchange for a fair rate of pay, without the obscene wealth and sense of entitlement Ford and his Wall Street buddies display.
I don't have to wonder too hard--I'm one of those people whose last job was killed by Ford-style economics. |
