What Would You Do With $270,000 Every Single Day?

Bank of America is paying $30 billion in bonuses.  You gave Bank of America $30 billion in tax dollars.

You put all your hard earned money in the bank. How much do they pay you in interest as way of thanking you for trusting them with your money?  1%? 2%?

Yet how much do you pay in interest on your credit cards?  Fees?  Is this the way you do business?

The banking industry now set to get huge, unprecedented bonuses, makes their money from taking money out of the system, and creating “value” for their owns banks.  How do they do this? Trading YOUR money, at huge risk, and then paying themselves enormous bonuses, patting themselves on the back so to speak, for a job well done.

One man at Citibank alone makes an annual bonus of $100 million.  Citibank argues that the man makes them $2 billion.  Yet where this man makes his money is through risking Citibank’s money (which in many ways is your money), and then when he makes the right bet (and, yes, it’s a bet, a wager), the money comes out of the market, which means someone was wrong and lost the money on the other side, and nothing, no thing, is created, manufactured, developed, produced, marketed, or used.  What this man does, and thousands like him, is move money around at risk.

And, to put it into perspective, for his betting, this man makes over $270,000 every single day of his life, and that’s just his bonus, and, there are hundreds of other people making this and much and more, just for betting your money.

Seems if this man, and others, making this much money, would simply take 10% of their earnings and funnel it back into the system to help solve hunger, homelessness, and universal healthcare, there may not be so much growing resentment and rage.

Letterman and Foreseeability

Foreseeability.

My very smart attorney father-in-law, the late Donald F. Connors, taught me about avoiding crisis by simply looking down the road and asking yourself, “If I do this, will it lead me to where I want to go?”  If not, Dad would say, “Don’t go there.”

Letterman and the CBS News 48 Hour producer.

Letterman’s got the platform and megaphone.

The producer has an attorney and some money problems.

Now the PR, crisis and reputational professionals will make some dough, the media is left to talking heads like me to fill space and hopefully shed some light on what looks like a typical case of extortion, and the general public is left to choose sides.

Yet I know, as do all my colleagues in crisis and reputation management, nothing is ever as it appears, and it’s going to take a while before the truth, or a close proximity, becomes clear.

Still, I’ll bet if David Letterman and Robert “Joe” Halderman had practiced foreseeability, they wouldn’t be in the middle of the reputational issue of their lives.