Guess Who Makes More Than Bankers: Their Regulators
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
> 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. The staff at the Federal Reserve is likely even better compensated, but the Fed refuses to release employee salaries.
Even more concerning, today there is little to no oversight of the rents the agencies can extract since the salaries aren't paid with tax dollars. Rather, they're paid using fees charged to the regulated institutions.
This is not to say that I endorse a world where large regulatory bodies take all the profits from the regulated and pay themselves salaries, just that this article is a little misleading.
> You might think high-paying jobs at these agencies require special skills. Not so. 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.
> Salary premiums are especially large for easy-to-fill jobs that require no specialized, hard-to-hire skills.