Pity the
poor investment bankers.
Facing a
sharp decline in revenue from banking and trading, many Wall Street firms have
trimmed 2011 discretionary pay, according to a Bloomberg News report, and that
has translated into shrinking paychecks and widespread unease.
Wall Street
types like Andrew Schiff, director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific
Capital, are feeling the pain.
Schiff told
Bloomberg that his reduced bonus means his $350,000 salary doesn’t cover his
family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Conn., summer rental and the upgrade
they would like for his 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex.
“I feel
stuck,” Schiff told Bloomberg. “The New York that I wanted to have is still just
beyond my reach.”
Cue the
tiny violins.
Across Wall
Street, smaller bonus checks are making upscale lifestyles harder to maintain,
Bloomberg reports, based on interviews with bankers, accountants, therapists,
advisers and headhunters.
At Goldman
Sachs and Barclays Capital, the cuts were at least 25 percent, Bloomberg said,
while Morgan Stanley has capped cash bonuses at $125,000.
However,
Bloomberg also notes that median household income in 2010 was $49,445,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau — lower than the previous year and less
than 1 percent of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s $7 million
restricted-stock bonus for 2011.
Richard
Scheiner, a 58 year-old real-estate investor and hedge-fund manager, told
Bloomberg that he spends about $500 a month to park one of his two Audis in a
garage and at least $7,500 a year each for memberships at the Trump National
Golf Club and a gun club in upstate New York.
He also
pays $17,000 a year on food, health care, boarding and a daily dog-walker (who
charges $17 each per outing) to look after a labradoodle named Zelda and a
rescued bichon fries named Duke.
But to make
ends meet he has sold two motorcycles he doesn’t use and makes do with his
Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet, which he called “the Volkswagen of
supercars,” Bloomberg said.
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