Well, they earned it

Stay classy, GS.

How might you compensate management for a year in which profits plunged, you spent $550 million of shareholder money to settle a fraud investigation and your stock ended up more or less exactly where it started?

You might be tempted to nix raises or withhold bonuses to send a responsible message about linking pay to performance. But if so, you wouldn't be Goldman Sachs (GS). It just had the year described above – and responded by tripling everyone's base salary while boosting bonuses by 40%.

America has the attention span of a fruit fly.