The Wall Street bonus, considered a sacred ritual, may become the industry’s biggest casualty as governments worldwide bail out financial institutions.
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The current system of “asymmetric compensation,” in which people are rewarded when they do well and aren’t required to return the rewards when they lose money, is detrimental to society and needs to change, said Nassim Taleb, a professor at New York University and author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” in an interview.
I'd like every financial employee to have a clawback provision in their employment agreement. I'll even do them one better: How about multi-generational clawbacks? In other words, if you're the progeny of someone who has worked in finance or real estate and you are responsible for a screw-up, the clawback applies to your rich mommy and daddy's income! Brilliant! Maybe ruling class parents would be dis-incentivized from pulling strings to land their kids six-figure jobs if they knew they'd be personally liable for their brats' non-performance. Yeah, I know, it probably won't fly under Anglo-Saxon common law. I would just love to see people hired for their looks or bloodlines get in trouble with their parents for the lack of competence they display on the job. I long ago had my fill of well-pedigreed fools. No one ever handed me a thing.
The one good aspect of the coming nationalization of American finance is that do-nothing preppies will hopefully no longer be rewarded for merely walking in the door with Daddy Warbucks' connections. They'll actually have to work for a living, and a meager one at that (by Wall Street standards).
