Translating the News

I could make a career out of translating new articles into common sense English. Here are some excerpts from a Washington Post article titled Wall Street Jacks Up Pay, edited for clarity.

Executives of Wall Street's biggest banks are setting aside billions of dollars more to pay their executives.

So far this year, the top six U.S. banks executives have set aside $74 billion to pay their employees themselves, up from $60 billion in the corresponding period last year.

He [Chief Financial Officer Colm Kelleher] said the ratio of revenue to compensation would have been close to 50 percent if Morgan Stanley were able to exclude a $2.3 billion charge it took arising from an accounting rule related to the company's debt. had just phonied up its accounting like Enron used to do.

"Unfortunately, this means that Q2 was a pretty good quarter for the employees, but not so for the shareholders," Hintz said. Morgan Stanley stockholders are ignorant sluts we reem whenever and however we want.

Rainmaker traders and bankers take home millions of dollars a year while secretaries settle for much less. do all the real work for slave wages.

They [investment banks] continue to benefit from use a variety of other emergency federal programs to pay for these bonuses.

Several bankers noted that the amounts set aside are not a perfect measure of what will be paid out in bonuses at year-end. They will be much higher.

And an AP article about civilian contractors doing translation for the US military in Afghanistan. The whole article can be shorted to:

The Pentagon would rather have out of shape, elderly (some in their 60's and 70's), and indolent civilians who don't speak the native language than someone who is competent, fit, and gay.