Wall Street bonuses as economic indicator
It’s that time of year again: Wall Street bonus season.
A survey Monday from Johnson Associates suggests this year will bring good news and bad news to different sectors of the financial industry, providing a mixed indicator of the health of the American financial industry, as well as the economy as a whole.
The survey has bad news for some of finance’s risk takers: Hedge funds and traders of stocks and bonds are predicted to see bonuses drop by as much as 10 percent from last year.
“The first question is: ‘Why are the trading bonuses lower?'” says Wallace Turbeville, senior fellow at Demos and former Goldman Sachs investment banker. “That could be a lot of reasons.”
Turbeville thinks it could be due to lower stock market volatility or an increase in automation. “But the real question is whether the traders are changing their behavior and putting less risk on the books at the banks and hedge funds,” he says. “That kind of risk can blow up, of course, that’s what happened in 2008.”
The Johnson Associates survey projects other sectors of the financial industry to see bonus increases. Investment bankers and private equity employees working on mergers and acquisitions are predicted to see increases of up to 15 percent.
“The picture is really quite bright, or it is getting brighter, for investment banking,” says S.P. Kothari, deputy dean at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
This is in part because of a number of big mergers and acquisitions this year, like Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner and AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV. This year’s M&A activity is on track to be one of the biggest, in dollar value, of all time.
“The merger activity is a harbinger of good prospects for the economy,” says Kothari.
For the financial industry, the good and bad prospects more or less average out: With bonuses factored in, take-home pay at commercial and investment banks is expected to be about the same as last year.
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