While the recent financial results are cheering – not least for the executives who received staggering bonuses – the recovery of the brand could still take a long time.
At the same time, the company's board had awarded a staggering billion-dollar bonus to its three top dogs, including Wang and Sanjay Kumar, the president and C.E.O.
As financial firms that faced collapse without government support have returned to making big profits, their employee bonuses, some of them staggering, have become a political issue on both sides of the Atlantic.
RBS, now 84% owned by the British taxpayer, will reveal its financial reports this week and it is rumoured to have set aside a bonus pool to the tune of a staggering £1.3bn.
The average Wall Street employee took home nearly $124,000 on top of his base salary last year a quarter more than in 2008 but still less than the average bonus in 2006, when the figure peaked at a staggering $191,360 per head.
Ever since it was revealed that John A. Thain had paid out $3.6 billion in bonuses two days before Merrill Lynch was acquired by Bank of America — and just weeks before it posted a staggering fourth-quarter loss of $15.3 billion — the country has been up in arms about Wall Street bonuses.
Critics of the bank pounced on that bonus, and many others it doled out, with one calling them a "staggering reward for failure".
After Mr. Lewis clinched his deal, Merrill lost a staggering $15.3 billion during the fourth quarter, but paid out billions of dollars in bonuses that Bank of America shareholders were unaware of when they voted to approve the deal.
At a time when taxpayers are still feeling the squeeze it's staggering that part-state-owned RBS and Lloyds will be paying out almost £900m in bonuses".
Transocean executives thought they deserved rich bonuses, as did their unabashed, deeply entitled peers on Wall Street, despite their staggering failures.
