On Friday, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France plans to announce a windfall tax “equivalent” to the 50 percent levy just unveiled in London by the Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, said Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, in an interview Thursday in Paris.
“We have been advocating this for a long time, and we are delighted to see that Gordon Brown is taking that stand,” Ms. Lagarde said. “The president,” she added, “thinks he is brave to take on the City.”
Mr. Brown and Mr. Sarkozy — whose relations have been strained in recent weeks — held a 30-minute meeting at the start of the European Union summit meeting here Thursday and buried other differences to agree a joint approach over bonuses.
Both countries say their stand should increase pressure on other nations to follow suit.
Maybe that's why Goldman Sachs made this announcement:
Moving to quell the uproar over the return of big paydays on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs announced on Thursday that its top executives would forgo cash bonuses this year and that it would give shareholders a say in determining compensation.
With a resurgent Goldman set to award billions of dollars in bonuses — a trove that could rival the record payouts of the bubble years — the bank said that its 30 most-senior executives would be paid in the form of a special stock, rather than in cash. Goldman said that it would also let its shareholders vote on its executives’ pay, although the decision would be nonbinding.
Knowing these weaselly bankers, they're some way they're overcompensating themselves again, and here after we bailed their asses out.
Criticism still coming from Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, calling out the President as well:
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.
How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?
And it looks like the Dems are having trouble coming up with rules to keep the collapse from happening again:
As the House took up a sweeping measure that would put new controls on businesses and financial institutions, a bloc of business-oriented Democrats threatened to withhold support because of their concerns about its impact on financial institutions.
To address those concerns, Representative Melissa Bean, Democrat of Illinois, a leader of the group called the New Democrat Coalition, offered a proposal to limit a state’s ability to impose tougher rules on national banks already judged to meet federal standards.
But liberal lawmakers, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were not eager to make concessions to banks given their role at the center of the economic crisis. The dispute stalled the beginning of a debate scheduled to run through Friday.
Bean there, done that, Melissa.
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