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Daley got $8.7M from JP Morgan Chase

New White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley received about $8.7 million in salary and bonuses from banking giant JP Morgan Chase since the beginning of last year, according to records released Friday.

A personal financial disclosure form Daley submitted soon after he joined the White House staff last month shows he earned $675,000 in salary in 2010 and was paid a bonus of nearly $3.2 million for the previous year. Early this year, before President Barack Obama hired him to run the White House, Daley received a single paycheck of about $7,000 and a bonus of roughly $4.8 million for his work at JP Morgan Chase the year before.

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Daley also cashed out a pension plan for a lump sum of about $6.7 million, the report discloses.

The figures come from a personal financial disclosure form Daley submitted soon after he joined the White House staff last month.

Obama’s decision to invite the well-compensated bank executive to the White House was widely seen as an overture to business, and is a measure of how dramatically the president’s tone towards the financial community has changed. In the early months of his administration, during the depths of the financial crisis, he regularly railed against excess on Wall Street.

After the outgoing Bush administration paid out billions in bailouts, the new president derided “fat cats” in the financial industry and lamented “fat bonuses” paid out to financiers and CEOs despite the 2008 market collapse. However, the president’s harsh rhetoric has faded over the past year, and in recent months he has embarked on an all-out effort to court the business community, hoping to accelerate the sluggish economic recovery and lower the 9 percent unemployment rate.

Along with hiring Daley, Obama’s outreach to corporate leaders has included extending the Bush-era tax cuts for high-income earners, hosting business leaders for a day-long summit at Blair House and putting General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt in charge of a new presidential advisory panel on jobs and global economic competiveness. The president is currently in the middle of a West Coast tour that had him dining Thursday night with Immelt and other top executives from internet and technology firms, including Twitter, Google and Facebook.

Today, Obama is in Oregon to tour a state-of-the-art Intel computer chip manufacturing plant.

In his first month on the job, Obama blasted Wall Street after news reports emerged about $20 billion in bonuses being awarded during the financial downturn.

“That is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful. And part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint and show some discipline and show some sense of responsibility,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office.

In a “60 Minutes” interview in December 2009, Obama again decried the bonuses.

“I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of, you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street. The only ones that are going to be paying out these fat bonuses are the ones that have now paid back that TARP money, and the people on Wall Street still don’t get it,” Obama said.

He spoke a few months after JP Morgan—which may never have needed emergency TARP funds to stay afloat —paid them back to the government in a move that freed them from new limits on executive bonuses at firms that took bailout money.

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Obama’s criticism of Wall Street rankled many in the financial community, so by early last year he began to tone it down, saying that he wasn’t troubled by a $9 million bonus for Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and a $17 million bonus for JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon, a regular visitor to Washington.

“I know both those guys. They’re very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system,” Obama told BusinessWeek last February. “I do think that the compensation packages that we’ve seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance.”

In 2004, Dimon hired Daley, commerce secretary under President Bill Clinton, as JP Morgan Chase’s midwest vice chairman, a position which had not existed previously. Three years later, JP Morgan put Daley in charge of corporate responsibility, a job which including doling out JP Morgan funds to charities and nonprofit groups.

In addition to his JP Morgan post, Daley also served on the boards of directors of Boeing and Abbott Laboratories. He reported $100,000 in board fees paid in cash by Boeing since 2010 and nearly $1.1 million in accumulated fees paid as Boeing stock that Daley said he planned to sell earlier this month.

Precisely how much Daley made from Abbott last year was not clear from the report, but he indicated his compensation for serving on the board was issued in stock rights. The rights over the full term of his service on the Abbott board were converted to stock worth almost $600,000. It was also scheduled to be sold earlier this month, the report said.

Senior government officials are required, within 30 days of being hired, to file public disclosures listing their income and assets, along with some financial details about family members. Daley’s form was released on the Friday before a holiday weekend—a time often used by administrations for disclosure of news likely to generate unfavorable coverage.


Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC
1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Suite 705
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com
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