Though the pace of growth of 15 selected banks have slowed, according to research group Equilar, their chiefs continue to see an increase in compensation. Among them, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit have enjoyed the largest gains. As Pat Garofalo at Think Progress pointed out, Bloomberg News estimates are even higher, reporting a bump of 20 percent since last year for Wall Street CEOs. And this despite the fact that inflation adjusted wages have declined by 0.6 percent between March 2011 and March 2012.
To add salt to the wound, Jamie Dimon was unabashed that his firm would again be profitable this quarter (to be released mid-July), which translates to more cash for the JPMorgan CEO. While Dimon suggested that clawbacks for their recent multi-billionaire loss would be seriously considered, no word has yet been given on the specific reclamations.
The Institute for Policy Studies alerted us about these alarming trends back in 2010:
[A]fter adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century.
American workers, by contrast, are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s.
