• Employees at Morgan Stanley earned $264,715 per person in bonus
• Lehman Brothers paid $334,000 per employee in bonus
• Goldman Sachs rewarded an average $622,000 per employee in bonus

Goldman Sachs’s (NYSE : GS, quote)chairman and chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein was paid a bonus of $53.4 million this year, 2006, the highest ever for a Wall Street chief executive. Together with his $600,000 salary, his income for the year totaled $ 54 million (from $ 38 million in 2005).

Earlier, Morgan Stanley (NYSE : MS, quote) paid its’ chief executive, John J. Mack, $41.1 million bonus last week – a record that lasted less than a week. Lehman Brothers (NYSE : LEH, quote), on the other hand paid it’s chairman and chief executive, Richard S. Fuld Jr., $11 million in restricted stock.

Goldman Sachs stock price is up almost 60 percent for the year 2006 creating a $90 billion market capitalization, more than triple when it went public in May-1999. Thompson Financial today announced Goldman Sachs as the overall champion amongst the global M&A advisers, with combined value deals of more than $1 trillion, or about 29 percent of the value of all the year’s deals. Citigroup (NYSE : C, quote), which ranked No. 5 last year is in second place this year with total deal value of $987 billion, or a 27.3 percent market share. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase (NYSE : JPM, quote) and Merrill Lynch (NYSE : MER, quote) are in third, fourth and fifth places respectively.

Wall Street bonuses are expected to hit a record $23.9 billion in 2006 – a staggering amount which according to Associated Press will boost New York economy with bankers having no problem in spending $15,000 bottles of champagne, $40,000 BMWs and multimillion-dollar apartments.

With soaring revenues, profits and per-share earnings investment banks which generally pay about 45 to 50 percent of net revenue in bonus to its’ employee is indeed the goose which lays golden eggs and should be your preferred industry if you’re looking for a career-change now.

# TIP: Get a job with investment banks regardless of your field as you won’t be able to get the amount of bonus or compensation elsewhere.

# TIP: Invest in investment banks stocks or consider option trading with sufficient time-value (at least 6 months expiry) as the year-end mergers will ensure good profit in the next quarter earning announcement.

Other Articles That May Interest You …

• Why Mega-Mergers Happen End Of The Year?

Tweet

December 20th, 2006 by financetwitter

If you enjoyed this post, what shall you do next? Consider: