Goldman bankers due for $580,000 bonus payouts

NEW YORK - Goldman Sachs, the mightiest of the world's investment banks, will reveal a new round of bumper bonus payouts this morning that is expected to average about US$450,000 ($580,708) per person, demonstrating that another year of public fury at bankers' pay has failed to change behaviour on Wall St and in the City of London.

The bank is likely to confirm that its latest annual bill for pay, perks and end-of-year bonuses is about US$16 billion.

Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have watched impotently as banks continue to pay out giant bonuses, in some cases returning close to the levels seen before the market meltdown of 2008 and the government bailouts that kept the financial system running.

Despite extensive Wall St reform designed to restrain the excesses that led to the credit crisis, Goldman and others are again posting near-record profits, and handing staff a large slice of the proceeds.

The announcement of Goldman's annual figures for 2010 will be the centrepiece of the earnings season, and the most important measure of the health of the financial sector, because the bank dominates trading and has become a lightning rod for public and political concern over Wall St practices.

Last year, in a move aimed at heading off some criticism, it unexpectedly pulled money out of the bonus pool for staff in the final months of the year, keeping average bonuses below the psychologically important level of US$500,000.

Goldman bankers, on average, earn more than 10 times the national average income in either Britain or the US.

Goldman has had to fight to repair the damage done to its reputation by political attacks, public anger over bonuses, and fraud charges that were laid against it last year relating to its conduct in the mortgage market before the credit crisis.

To the wider public, the bank has become viewed as "a giant vampire squid, wrapped round the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" - in the memorable phrase of the Rolling Stone magazine journalist Matt Taibbi.

- INDEPENDENT