CEO pay at 15 of the world’s major banks shot up by 17pc last year, according to a survey conducted by Equilar and published by the Financial Times Friday.

The typical chief executive at the banks surveyed received $14.5m last year, up from $12.4m in 2013. The biggest payout went to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose compensation more than doubled, hitting $27.6m.

The ever-growing payouts to bank executives are the outcome of the measures taken following the 2008 financial crash by the Obama administration and its counterparts around the world, which have aimed at increasing the wealth of the financial oligarchy. The report of the payouts comes less than two months after the latest settlement with major global banks, in which JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland admitted to conspiring to rig global currency exchange rates in order to make billions of dollars at the expense of businesses and individuals around the world.

The foreign exchange rigging settlement, and the wrist-slap fines it entailed, did nothing to impact payouts to the five banks’ CEOs, all of whom were on the list of top-paid executives this year. Next on the list is Morgan Stanley CEO James P. Gorman, whose pay increased 60pc last year, to $23.m.

The lowest-paid executive on the Financial Times list is Ross McEwan, CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, who received ‘only’ $7.4m. RBS is 81pc owned by the British government, meaning the majority of McEwan’s payout came out of the pockets of UK taxpayers.

It is now six years since the Obama administration appointed mediator Kenneth Feinberg as its ‘special master’ of executive pay for companies that were bailed out by the government during the 2008 financial crisis. In the immediate aftermath of the bank bailout, Feinberg rubber-stamped multimillion-dollar bonuses to executives at firms that had received billions of dollars in bailout funds, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

Having performed this service for the US financial oligarchy, Feinberg was last month appointed by the Obama administration to oversee the slashing of pension benefits of retirees at multi-employer pension funds. Feinberg will be given unilateral authority to impose benefit cuts on workers who vote against proposals to slash their benefits.

In addition to direct bailouts, banks have been among the principal beneficiaries of the US Federal Reserve’s policies of near-zero interest rates and ‘quantitative easing’, by means of which virtually free money has been pumped into the financial system. This policy has been mirrored by central banks throughout the world.

The massive handout to the financial aristocracy has accelerated even as the banks have cut back lending for productive investment. Instead, the banks have used the cash they received at public expense to enrich their shareholders and executives through share buybacks, dividend increases and mergers and acquisitions — all entirely parasitic activities.

— Courtesy WSWS

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, July 6th, 2015

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