{"id":304963,"date":"2010-02-10T14:30:59","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T19:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.35710"},"modified":"2010-02-10T15:15:37","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T20:15:37","slug":"dont-begrudge-obama-his-bloomberg-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/304963","title":{"rendered":"Don’t “Begrudge” Obama His Bloomberg Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an interview with Bloomberg\/BusinessWeek, President Obama toned down the anti-Wall Street rhetoric and called the heads of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs “very savvy businessmen.” Naturally, everybody is furious now<\/a>, because indirectly complimenting bankers for being clever<\/i> is a monstrous act of treasonous barbarism, or something.<\/p>\n

Let’s see what Obama really said. The Bloomberg begins like this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

President Barack Obama said he
\ndoesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9
\nmillion issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein,
\nnoting that some athletes take home more pay.<\/p>\n

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response
\nto a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary
\namount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball
\nplayers who are making more than that and don’t get to the World
\nSeries either, so I’m shocked by that as well.” <\/p>\n

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy
\nbusinessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval
\nOffice with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on
\nnewsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t
\nbegrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-
\nmarket system.” <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This makes it sound like Obama is specifically
\ndefending the $17 million and $9 million bonuses. He wasn’t, really, defending any kind of bonus. If anything, he was softly criticizing Wall Street’s bonus culture. The
\nactual exchange went like this: <\/p>\n

\n

QUESTION: Let’s talk bonuses for a minute: Lloyd
\nBlankfein, $9 million; Jamie Dimon, $17 million. Now, granted, those
\nwere in stock and less than what some had expected. But are those
\nnumbers okay?<\/p>\n

THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, first of all, I know
\nboth those guys. They’re very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of
\nthe American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s
\npart of the free market system. I do think that the compensation
\npackages that we’ve seen over the last decade at least have not matched
\nup always to performance. I think that shareholders oftentimes have not
\nhad any significant say in the pay structures for CEOs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What sentence here is supposed to get my blood boiling, exactly? These are
\nobviously savvy, politically aware businessmen. When Blankfein
\nannounced that he would be taking a $9 million all-stock
\nbonus after some of Goldman’s most profitable quarters ever (he took a
\nrecord $67.9 million bonus in 2007), plenty of news
\norganizations called<\/a>
\nthe move savvy. For Obama to state the same isn’t a capitulation to
\nWall St., it’s an acknowledgment of fact. Moreover, Obama is absolutely right
\nthat Americans don’t normally begrudge success or wealth. That’s one reason I’ve been told that middle Americans usually don’t want to jack up the top marginal tax rate — “It could be me one day,” and so forth. Obama’s also
\nright that the kind of success and wealth achieved on Wall Street
\nhasn’t match up with performance in the last few years. Some tweaks to bonus pay protocol would be nice to see. <\/p>\n

Liberal<\/a>
\nblogs are suffering conniption fits over the idea that Obama didn’t
\nspend the whole interview sweating in an apoplectic rage about bonus
\nfigures. I can’t muster their indignation. Responding to a question about Goldman’s bonuses just days after its CEO converted his pay to stock and slashed it by 80 percent, Obama spoke calmly about how Wall Street’s bonus culture has misaligned incentives. Good for him. And bad on Bloomberg News for splicing his quotes suggestively.


\n

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\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an interview with Bloomberg\/BusinessWeek, President Obama toned down the anti-Wall Street rhetoric and called the heads of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs “very savvy businessmen.” Naturally, everybody is furious now, because indirectly complimenting bankers for being clever is a monstrous act of treasonous barbarism, or something. Let’s see what Obama really said. The Bloomberg […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-304963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}