Goldman Sachs Group Inc awarded chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein a US$5 million cash bonus to be paid out in three years if he meets certain targets, on top of US$21 million in compensation last year.
The long-term incentive was US$3 million last year and US$7 million in 2011 when the program began, the New York-based bank said on Friday in a filing. The awards can shrink or grow depending on whether the firm achieves a 10 percent average return on equity and 7 percent average increase in book value per share.
Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs, which already gives a portion of top executives’ pay in restricted stock, have been seeking ways to encourage managers to focus on long-term performance. Goldman Sachs’s plan gives the board’s compensation committee, led by former Fannie Mae CEO James Johnson, the power to change the awards to so-called named executive officers, or NEOs.
“Our compensation committee may also, in its sole discretion based on its assessment of an individual NEO’s performance, adjust the amounts that may be paid under this award,” according to the filing, which says the committee can give between 0 percent and 150 percent of the amount due.
The firm also granted company president Gary Cohn a US$5 million long-term award this year. Vice chairmen J. Michael Evans and John Weinberg got US$4 million incentives. Last year, all of the firm’s executives named in the proxy received US$3 million in long-term incentives, down from US$7 million for all of the executives in 2011.
While the Goldman Sachs awards are initially tied to three-year periods, the board can opt to extend the measurement for another five years. In December last year, the compensation committee set the performance period for the 2011 incentive pay to end in December 2018 instead of December this year.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
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