Bankers’ Pay Locked Up: Why Not Lock Up Part of Coral Gables’ Management Salaries

Interesting.

Why not lock up (say) 20 percent of the city manager’s salary, the financial manager’s salary and any other relevant functionaries’ salaries that have to do with good management and budget administration in the city of Coral Gables.  Then release all or part of the salary the following years if work is satisfactory and the budget executed properly.

According to the Wall Street Journal, for 2008 there were nearly 5,000 bonus payments in excess of $1 million at “the largest US banks that accepted Treasury aid.”

Rather the push to constrain bank executive pay comes from officials and the political elite in continental Europe – supported by an increasingly effective pro-reform group around the Bank of England (led by Mervyn King, the governor).  There is also supportive language in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, although this by itself rather vague and completely open to interpretation by the regulators.

Still, the overall proposal is entirely reasonable and well thought through at a general level: “lock-up” a considerable fraction of bank bonuses until we see, after several years, exactly how the banks do.

via Bankers’ Pay On The Line Again « The Baseline Scenario.

Defend Free Speech

This correctly defends the right of the press and others (including, websites like Wikileaks ) to circulate information of the government after it has been leaked by its own employees. At the very least the leaking of information by a low level functionary is a sign of serious government mismanagement and an overreaching of government’s unnecessary classification of information.

Otherwise, anyone utilizing this information might be subject to government prosecution.

It is the job of government to defend its own secrets.

…this proposed law may be constitutional as applied to government employees who unlawfully leak such material to people who are unauthorized to receive it, it would plainly violate the First Amendment to punish anyone who might publish or otherwise circulate the information after it has been leaked. At the very least, the act must be expressly limited to situations in which the spread of the classified information poses a clear and imminent danger of grave harm to the nation.

via A Clear and Present Danger to Free Speech – NYTimes.com.