In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Aaron Task at YTT asks:

Are Bonus Restrictions Driving Top Talent Overseas?

Depends. Are we talking about the same "top talent" that crashed our entire economy into the ground? If that's true, then good riddance to bad rubbish. But he goes on:

But there actually is some truth to the we have to pay our top people outlandish salaries argument, says Mark DeCambre, Wall Street reporter for The New York Post.

Relatively strong European firms like Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank are in a hiring mode, he says, as are smaller shops like Jefferies Group, hedge funds and boutiques like Greenhill and Moelis & Co.

In other words, there's always a market for top talent, whom DeCambre likens to a star pitcher or slugger on a baseball team. The team may have a strong bench, but isn't going very far without its top players.

So be it, you might say - but all those bailout billions will most definitely go to waste if the recipients can't compete in the global marketplace.

I'm thinking I'm not going to want to choose to do business with the company that lost tens of billions of dollars anyway, because I have every reason to believe the company's "top talent" -- the same people they are paying "outlandish salaries" to retain -- are not the people I want to give my money to. In fact, we now have empirical evidence that the "top talent" of the companies in question are greedy douchebags who drove their companies into near insolvency.

Bonus restrictions driving these idiots overseas may be the smartest thing America has done in years. They can't compete in the marketplace anyway...in which case let's nationalize the insolvent sacks of crap and break them up.

Problem solved. Hey Aaron, let's stop pretending that the Captains of Industry were innocent here.