Man on street has no time for Wall Street

WASHINGTON: Wall Street firms are recovering. Their standing with the American public isn't.

Executives at financial firms, coming off two years of failures, bailouts and writedowns, are less popular than Congress, lawyers and insurance companies.

As they prepare to give out year-end bonuses, they risk another wave of public fury, according to a Bloomberg National Poll.

Two-thirds of Americans say they have an unfavorable view of financial executives. More than half say big financial companies are only out to enrich themselves and also say they shouldn't have received government aid.

And most Americans don't want to see bankers collecting fat checks at the end of the year if their companies were bailed out by taxpayers.

"The fact that they're even in existence should be bonus enough," says Cassie Swihart, a 58-year-old retired registered nurse from Warsaw, Indiana, who responded to the poll of 1,000 US adults, conducted Dec 3-7 by Selzer & Co, a Des Moines, Iowa-based firm. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Banks that got taxpayer help through the Troubled Asset Relief Program - the $700 billion financial rescue plan passed by Congress last year - shouldn't pay any bonuses, according to 75 percent of those polled.

Of those, 51 percent say even the banks that have paid the government back shouldn't be rewarding their employees so soon.

"Why would you want to give somebody a bonus who put us into this situation?" said respondent Elijah Brown, 42, an unemployed union contractor from California.

Bloomberg News

(China Daily 12/14/2009 page11)