For those of you worried about Ken Lewis’ financial well-being since his announcement on Wednesday night that he was stepping down as Bank of America’s CEO, rest easy: he’s set to walk away with a $53 million pension plan. Fortune reports that this money will come from a pension plan, frozen years ago, that awarded certain top executives with extra benefits.
That $53 million isn’t all Lewis will be walking away with — in addition to retirement benefits, there are millions in accumulated stock and other compensation. As the Fortune piece notes, assessing Lewis’ “walking away pay is an inexact science.” A Reuters piece puts Lewis’ total at $125 million, and adds that he may be facing a “reckoning with the U.S. government’s pay czar [Kenneth Feinberg].”
Since it published — and removed — a column describing the possibility of a military coup to “resolve the Obama problem,” conservative magazine Newsmax has gone into full damage control mode, distancing itself from the columnist. The columnist, John L. Perry, “has no official relationship with Newsmax other than as an unpaid blogger,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.
That’s not quite the wording on his Newsmax biography. There, Perry is described as an “award-winning newspaper editor and writer” who “contributes a regular column to Newsmax.com.” He’s also a former senior editor for the site, working in that role from late 1999 until October 2001.
Perry has written for the site regularly — nearly every single week — since November 1999. Newsmax was founded in 1998.
And a scant minority are adamant in their demand for government reparations to those who have been abducted and/or probed by aliens.
I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”
That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that.
