Senate banking chairman: Confiscate Wall St. bonuses

By Alexander Bolton
Posted: 01/29/09 03:18 PM [ET]
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) has vowed to use all legal means available to confiscate Wall Street bonuses paid out at the end of last year.
Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, told reporters that he would press the Treasury Department to recoup the more than $18 billion in Wall Street bonuses paid out after one of the worst years in stock market history.
The White House said Thursday that President Obama had one word in reaction to a report from the New York state comptroller that Wall Street firms paid nearly $20 billion in bonuses — "outrageous."
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama was appalled by the report, and planned to address it during a meeting with new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
The bonuses were paid despite the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing a third of its value in 2008.
The bonuses also took place as the federal government offered hundreds of billions to the banking industry.
“I’m going to look at every possible legal means and otherwise to make sure this money gets paid back. We can’t be underwriting [this] to the tune of billions of dollars,” said Dodd.
Dodd said the Wall Street bonuses are unacceptable at a time when the government is pouring tens of billions of dollars into banks to shore up the ailing financial market.
Dodd said if taxpayer money was used, “directly or indirectly,” to pay bonuses, “This infuriates the American people, and rightly so.
“If you do it I’m going to bring you before the committee and demand to know why you have the right to give those kind of benefits to people in the midst of this kind of crisis when American [taxpayers] are writing checks to underwrite this kind of activity,” Dodd said.
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