You want to know why everyone in this country hates you and wants you dead, you big stupid f#*&@ng bank?
Here's why, pay attention:
(Reuters) – Bank of America Corp will pay $11 million to ousted executives Joe Price and Sallie Krawcheck, a large payout at a time when banks face protests over pay but smaller than the eight-figure packages some executives received before the financial crisis.
Krawcheck -- a former Citigroup Inc executive who came to Bank of America in 2009 and was one of the top-ranking women on Wall Street -- will receive a one-time payment of $5.15 million, according to separation agreements filed by the bank on Friday.
Price, a Bank of America veteran, gets $4.15 million. Each will also receive $850,000 over a one-year period.
Price was head of consumer banking and Krawcheck led wealth and investment operations.
Elevenmilliondollars? What the hell world are you inhabiting? Eleven million dollars for two departing executives because things didn't work out? I'm sorry, but were these two executives of Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez-level importance for your organization? Is that why there are severance deals like this in place? Or are you just completely psychotic?
It's not that this isn't your prerogative as a private company - it is. But seriously, numbers like these at a time when you're instituting added fees on customer accounts just sound farcical, almost like you're making these payments to get a reaction out people.
You look completely ridiculous with news like this at a time when thousands of people are massing in every major city in the country to make the case that you don't deserve to exist. At a time when you're being investigated for employing robo-signers just to maintain a certain level of foreclosures processed per month. At a time when you're laying off rank-and-file employees not by the hundreds, not by the thousands - but in the tens of thousands. At a time when retired seniors, desperately seeking income, have been pushed into annuities, life settlements, commodities and junk bonds because of the zero percent interest rate policy that was meant to nurse you and your balance sheet back to health - and this is what you do with the money? With OUR money?
Are you crazy?
You pay fired executives more in severance than the average American worker will earn in a lifetime. For most people on the outside looking in, this seems like it's from outer space, another world entirely. These numbers just do not exist to regular human beings, they cannot be fathomed. The ordinary American is not a class warrior or a woe-is-me whiner coveting the rewards of others - the ordinary American simply believes that extraordinary rewards should go to those who do extraordinary things, not to paper-pushing failures at parasite banks.
So let me give you a hint that will save you countless hours and millions of dollars spent on consultants and the public relations morons you keep on staff: This is why they hate you. This very type of thing, while just a single example, epitomizes the piggish mentality that has set you apart from everyone else. This is why they're marching against you and calling for boycotts and writing their politicians. And this is why your whole model and way of life is on its way to being dead. Forever.
You want to roll your eyes and make snide remarks about "dumb college kids" and "socialists"? Go ahead but you're be missing the point. Because it is the small business owner who's really been wronged here, not the fringe elements you mockingly dismiss. The business owner whose losses are not socialized like yours, the business owner without the government in his pocket, the business owner who is forced to play by the rules that you have paid to have written. He's not a hippie, he's not a Marxist...but he's waking up, dummy.
You blew the second chance you got with TARP to re-enter society as a productive component of commerce. You went back to bonus-swilling, full-retard mode as though nothing ever happened and 13 million people weren't sitting around in their post credit-bubble joblessness for three years now. Your tone-deafness and utter disconnection from the rest of the country has produced something extraordinary - You've managed to awaken one of the most indolent, lethargic and apathetic populaces in the history of the world. You've now stirred a slumbering nation of 300 million from it's Entennman's and Zoloft-induced stupor. America is awake now and it's pissed.
Good luck with that.
This originally appeared on Joshua Brown’s blog, The Reformed Broker. Josh Brown is a New York City-based financial advisor at Fusion Analytics. His clients range from individuals to corporations to retirement plans to charitable foundations.
