Wall Street Bonus Babies by Andrew Beveridge 28 Jan 2005
Every year at this time, wine sellers take out their $500 bottles of Bordeaux; car dealers expect a rush on $100,000 Bentleys, Porsches and Lamborghinis; real estate agents witness perfectly normal-looking people plunking down several million dollars -- in cash -- to buy an apartment. "I call them ego apartments," one agent told the New York Sun.
It is bonus time on Wall Street, and this year in particular, there are some very happy people, from luxury suit salesmen to municipal tax collectors; the total estimated amount of bonuses (In PDF format) given out this quarter for work done in 2004 is expected to be the second biggest in history -- $15.9 billion.
Officially, the average bonus on Wall Street is $100,000. But this is an example of when statistics bear little relationship to reality. The truth is that there are a relative handful of people who work on Wall Street who get bonuses, and what they get can be astronomical.
So who are the Wall Street bonus babies?
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