White Boys Getting PAID: That Line at the Ferrari Dealer? It's Bonus Season on Wall Street

Samantha Kleier Forbes, a 30-year-old real estate broker, was getting ready to leave for a vacation to Florida with her mother and sister when she got an urgent call. It was a client who had spent the summer scouring the Upper East Side of Manhattan for an apartment priced between $4 million and $5 million. The client insisted on seeing more apartments that day, but now she wanted to look in the $6 million range. Her husband, a banker at Goldman Sachs in his late 30's, had just received his year-end bonus. "Normally this time of year is dead," said Ms. Forbes, a vice president at Gumley Haft Kleier, a residential real estate brokerage. But this winter there is unusual buying interest that she attributes to rich Wall Street bonuses. She is cutting her end-of-the-year vacation short, so she can prepare for an onslaught of clients eager to see apartments. The year-end bonus is a Wall Street tradition, and for a second consecutive year, the amounts are significant. Three major Wall Street firms - Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns - have reported record profits for the year and all are said to have given out handsome bonuses. The totals in 2003 were already impressive: Lloyd S. Blankfein, the president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs made $20.1 million, of that only $600,000 was salary; and E. Stanley O'Neal, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, received a bonus of $13.5 million and restricted stock worth $11.2 million on top of his $500,000 salary.  [more]