Stock-market valuations, by one measure, have hit levels surpassed only a few times in the past, including the Great Depression and the dot-com bubble.
Most institutions that go bankrupt have lots of assets, it’s just that they have even more debts, and debt has various levels of seniority with the most senior debt payed first from whatever assets the company has, then if any assets are left the next more senior debt paid from them and so on until there are no more assets, and whomever was holding the more junior debt gets nothing (and stockholders are even more junior than any debt, so they usally get nothing).
There are tons of ways to take advantage of such a system (this being the fishy part) some of which are legal (so, even more fishy), and this being a large financial institution (who generally specialize in exactly playing the money game, including tax evasion, avoidance and all sorts of shennenigans) I’m almost sure the compensation for the CEO was made to be senior enough in the debt heirarchy that it ended up high enough that there was still money left from the sale of the company’s assets after covering any debt that was even senior to it, to pay for it.
The Finance Industry is a complete total swamp, a politically endorsed swamp even, which is partly why I’m not working in the Industry anymore.
That’s how it should be, not how it is.
Most institutions that go bankrupt have lots of assets, it’s just that they have even more debts, and debt has various levels of seniority with the most senior debt payed first from whatever assets the company has, then if any assets are left the next more senior debt paid from them and so on until there are no more assets, and whomever was holding the more junior debt gets nothing (and stockholders are even more junior than any debt, so they usally get nothing).
There are tons of ways to take advantage of such a system (this being the fishy part) some of which are legal (so, even more fishy), and this being a large financial institution (who generally specialize in exactly playing the money game, including tax evasion, avoidance and all sorts of shennenigans) I’m almost sure the compensation for the CEO was made to be senior enough in the debt heirarchy that it ended up high enough that there was still money left from the sale of the company’s assets after covering any debt that was even senior to it, to pay for it.
The Finance Industry is a complete total swamp, a politically endorsed swamp even, which is partly why I’m not working in the Industry anymore.