As President Bush asks for quick work on bailout, what about executives' huge paydays?
President Bush pushed today for quick, clean action by Congress on his proposed emergency legislation to clean up the mess on Wall Street, before leaving the Oval Office and heading to New York himself.
But what about the proposal from a leading House Democrat to crack down on huge, ultra-huge paydays for executives -- especially those of firms that are in line to tap into the Bush administration's $700-billion bailout?
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, noted the "perverse incentive" in which executives got multimillion-dollar payoffs for taking tremendous risks.
As the Wall Street Journal reported his morning, he said on C-SPAN on Sunday that he'd be asking for guidelines on how executives should be compensated. That means: Should they be rewarded for running their companies into the ground?
That debate, of course, could fly in the face ...
... of Bush's demand, issued as the financial markets were opening this morning, that Congress not clutter the legislation with additional proposals.
The president said in a written statement:
It would not be understandable if members of Congress sought to use this emergency legislation to pass unrelated provisions, or to insist on provisions that would undermine the effectiveness of the plan.
In other words, he said, keep "the rescue bill focused on solving the crisis in our financial markets."
Of course, there could be some debate over whether executives' multimillion-dollar pay days -- and the risks they took to get there -- played a role in the crisis.
Regardless, Bush said:
Americans are watching to see if Democrats and Republicans, the Congress and the White House, can come together to solve this problem with the urgency it warrants. Indeed, the whole world is watching to see if we can act quickly to shore up our markets and prevent damage to our capital markets, businesses, our housing sector, and retirement accounts.
And with that, the president headed off to a Republican fundraising party in New Jersey and then to New York, for the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.
First stop in New York: Wall Street -- or, to be precise, the Wall Street heliport on the East River.
That was as close as he was planning to get to Wall Street itself -- figuratively or literally -- on a trip focused on foreign policy, but played out, unavoidably, against a backdrop of global financial crisis.
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Ron Edmonds / Associated Press
