AP broke the big news -- better be sitting down: "During the 2003-06 boom, the three agencies that supervise most U.S. banks – the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – gave out at least $19 million in bonuses"
Oh my god! oh my god! Just think, the money used to pay bonuses at these three agencies over this three year period would have been almost enough to pay the one-year bonus of a single top performer at Goldman or AIG. What an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars.
It is understandable that AP would look into this issue, but responsible people there should have quickly realized that there is nothing here. We have all sorts of incompetents running the regulatory agencies (starting with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke), and we should certainly be asking about whether they deserve their paychecks, but the money at issue with these bonuses is far too trivial to waste anyone's time with.
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