Guess Who Makes More Than Bankers: Their Regulators

In 2012 at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. the average pay was $190,000. At the Federal Reserve? It won't say.

Click here to read the WSJ article. Excerpts:

"the average annual salary of a bank employee was $49,540 in 2012, not much higher than the average annual across all occupations, $45,790.'

"Before the Dodd-Frank Act, the average employee of a federal bank regulatory agency received 2.3 times the average compensation of a private banker. By 2013 this ratio increased to more than 2.7—and in some cases considerably more.

The average compensation at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) exceeded $190,000 in 2012. "

"At the OCC, secretaries make on average $79,182 per annum. Motor vehicle operators (the agency's limo drivers) at the FDIC earn $82,130. Human resources management trainees at the CFPB make $110,759 a year."

"In 2012, 68% of FDIC and CFPB staff—and 66% at the OCC—earned above $100,000 a year. Nearly 19% of the CFPB and OCC staff earn more than $180,000 a year. At the OCC, 10.5% of workers earn above $200,000 a year, at the FDIC 9.3%.

Fewer than 7% of employees in any of these regulatory agencies earned less than $50,000. In other words, 93% of the employees in these federal bank regulatory agencies earned more than the average banker's salary in 2012."

"The Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 permitted federal bank regulatory agencies to establish their own compensation and benefits without the approval of the Office of Personnel Management."

"Salary premiums are especially large for easy-to-fill jobs that require no specialized, hard-to-hire skills."

"all federal bank regulatory agencies (except the Fed) are now allowing employee unions to negotiate compensation. Only a few other, small, government agencies can set employee pay independent of the government's general scale."

"Who pays for these generous salaries? Bank shareholders pay directly through insurance premiums on deposits and examination fees levied by the bank regulatory agencies."

"The runaway labor costs of these regulator agencies are not subject to congressional control, and they add up. Employee compensation accounts for about 80% of the operating costs of bank regulatory agencies. If the average regulatory employee's compensation were equalized between bankers and regulators, the direct cost of bank regulation would fall by more than 50%."