Goldman Sachs tops bonus list

With the upcoming end of the year, pay and bonuses became once again keywords.

21st Century Business Herald reporter found that Goldman Sachs is thriving this year, and their employees' salaries will also increase. Big banks like Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank also launched various pay policies with their own styles.

Excluding year-end bonuses, according to the first three quarters earning reports of the above-mentioned large banks, in the first nine months this year, Goldman Sachs gained profit of 8.44 billion U.S. dollars, while paying their 31,700 employees a total of 16.7 billion U.S. dollars in salaries and benefits. That's about 527,000 U.S. dollars per capita which exceeds 2008 when the bank paid 395,000 U.S. dollars per capita.

In the first nine months Morgan Stanley paid salaries of only 175,300 U.S. dollars per capita. Compared with Goldman Sachs, another major U.S. bank JP Morgan Chase is dwarfed with per capita salary of only 98,700 U.S. dollars during the same period, but it is worth noting that salaries of investment banking sector at JP Morgan Chase Bank reached 353.8 thousand U.S. dollars per capita over the same period.

Among the three major EU banks, in the first nine months of this year the per capita pay of Credit Suisse and UBS are 253,000 U.S. dollars and 184,000 dollars and Deutsche Bank the per capita about 164,000 U.S. dollars (after the exchange rate conversion), all lagging far behind Goldman Sachs, but on the whole they are no worse than the other two U.S. banks.

A headhunter in private equity and investment banking sector at Mankeep Group told reporter, "a few years ago when the market was doing well, foreign banks offered very attractive pay, but now many foreign banks no longer guarantee a bonus when they recruit people."

By People's Daily Online