U.S. pays bankers best, by millions

By Steve Eder

Reuters

You wouldn’t know it by his pay stubs, but Jiang Jianqing heads the world’s largest bank.

Jiang, chairman of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, made $234,700 in 2008. That’s less than 2 percent of the $19.6 million awarded to Jamie Dimon, chief executive of the world’s fourth-largest bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The contrast illustrates the massive differences in pay among the CEOs of the world’s top banks. The compensation of the CEOs of the largest U.S. banks towers above what’s paid to banking chiefs in other parts of the world, according to a Reuters analysis of pay at the 18 biggest banks by market value.

Excessive compensation at banks is expected to be discussed this week at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh. But consensus on the issue remains a distant hope as there continue to be vast differences in how bankers are paid.

The United States is home to four of the nine largest banks in the world — JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup Inc. It is also home to four of the six most handsomely rewarded bank CEOs.

“The U.S. executive pay levels have always dwarfed pay for companies elsewhere in the world,” said Sarah Anderson, of the Institute for Policy Studies.

“They have claimed it is impossible to recruit people without paying such compensation. Yet, if you look at the pay levels in Europe and in a lot of Asian countries, somehow they manage to find people who can run major global firms while making a fraction of what they make in the U.S.,” she said.

Chinese banks, state-controlled, are typically led by bureaucrats the central government appoints, and pay is capped.