Quote from Chagi:
I can't blame the shareholders, one would think that Goldman board should have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. I understand this whole "pay for performance" concept, but at some point you also need to reward your equity investors.
I would not be surprised to see a slow or medium rate bleed on the stock as common shareholders figure it is time to get out while the getting is good.
The type of behaivor you are seeing (insiders selling shares as fast as they can, the enron cowboy attitude with bonuses and we are the smartest people in the room attitude)
Is not exactly going to reassure longterm equity holders. Insider selling of common and record bonuses is usually a bad sign.
Little Deja Vu
The Enron Corporation paid its executives huge one-time bonuses last year as a reward for hitting a series of stock-price targets ending in 2000 -- the very time, investigators now say, when corporate officials were improperly inflating the company's profits by as much as a billion dollars.
The bonus payments and other special cash distributions include some $320 million paid just 10 months before Enron's collapse into bankruptcy, according to company records. Legal experts said that the payments could provide strong evidence of a motive for the financial machinations that investigators think distorted the company's reported performance and ultimately led to its demise. Without those efforts, the profit and stock price levels required to obtain the money almost certainly would not have been reached.
Details of the bonuses -- as well as other payments totaling more than $432 million made to almost 2,000 corporate executives during the two years before Enron's collapse -- are described in spreadsheets and data maintained on the corporate computers, information that has been obtained by federal prosecutors. Copies of the spreadsheets were also obtained by The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/01/b...ation-enron-paid-huge-bonuses-01-experts.html
That is what I call a swing.