Ruling Elite

I found this interesting description of the 'financial ruling class' by James Petras:

The financial ruling class is internally stratified into three sub-groups:
at the top are big private equity bankers and hedge-fund managers, followed by
the Wall Street chief executives, who in turn are above the next rung of senior
associate or vice-presidents of a big private equity funds who is followed by
their counterparts at Wall Street’s public equity funds. Top hedge fund managers
and executive have made $1 billion dollars or more a year – several times what
the CEO’s make at publicly traded investment houses. For example in 2006 Lloyd
Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, was paid $53.4 million, while Dan Ochs,
executive of the hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital paid himself $220 million dollars.
That same year the Morgan Stanley CEO received $40 million dollars, while the
chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel was paid over $300 million
dollars.

While the ‘hedge fund’ speculators receive the highest annual salaries, the
private equity executives can equal their hundreds of millions payments through
deal fees and special dividend payments from portfolio companies. This was
especially true in 2006 when buyouts reached a record $710 billion dollars. The
big bucks for the private equity bosses comes from the accumulating stake
executives have in portfolio companies. They typically skim 20% of profits,
which are realized when a group sells or lists a portfolio company. At that
time, the payday runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The subset of the financial ruling class is the ‘junior bankers’ of private
equity firms who take about $500,000 a year. At the bottom rung are the ‘junior
bankers’ of publicly traded investment houses (‘Wall Street’) who average
$350,000 a year. The financial ruling class is made up of these
multi-billionaire elites from the hedge funds, private and public equity bankers
and their associates in big prestigious corporate legal and accounting firms.
They in turn are linked to the judicial and regulatory authorities, through
political appointments and contributions, and by their central position in the
national economy.

Within the financial ruling class, political leadership does not usually
come from the richest hedge fund speculators, even less among the ‘junior
bankers’. Political leaders come from the public and private equity banks,
namely Wall Street - especially Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group and
others. They organize and fund both major parties and their electoral campaigns.
They pressure, negotiate and draw up the most comprehensive and favorable
legislation on global strategies (liberalization and deregulation) and sectoral
policies (reductions in taxes, government pressure on countries like China to
‘open’ their financial services to foreign penetration and so on). They pressure
the government to ‘bailout’ bankrupt and failed speculative firms and to balance
the budget by lowering social expenditures instead of raising taxes on
speculative ‘windfall’ profits.