Bank Bonuses Boom by 17 Percent

The Democratic Party’s brief romance with Wall Street is over: The securities and investments industry gave 2 to 1 to Democrats at the start of 2009, but now it’s giving almost half its money to Republicans, says The Washington Post. Also, after briefly giving more to Democrats, commercial banks and their employees gave Republicans nearly twice as much as they gave Democrats in the last three months of 2009. Banks are presumably nervous about Obama’s push for financial regulation, though it’s not exactly as though the Democratic regime has quashed them: Bank bonuses rose 17 percent in 2009 to $20.3 billion. That’s short of the record $25.6 billion paid in 2005, but because so much of last year’s bonuses were paid in deferred stock, the actual value of those bonuses is likely to be much greater than reported.