John Thain: The dumbest act on Wall Street

Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain has a reputation as the smartest guy on Wall Street. But his request to the bank's board for a $5-$10 million bonus  for rescuing Merrill Lynch from a fate worse than Lehman was not only crass and insensitive, it was also just plain dumb.

Does Thain - a multi-millionaire from his days at Goldman Sachs - really need the money? Is he so isolated from events on Main Street and the wider economy that he thought this extraordinary request would pass without comment? And more to the point does he deserve it?

While some commentators think that Thain's decision to sell up to Bank of America was bonus-worthy, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo took a slightly diffferent view.

"Current reports that the Board is considering giving Merrill's Chief Executive Officer a $10 million bonus are nothing less than shocking," he wrote in a stiff letter to Merrill's board of directors. "In terms of performance, Merrill has reported losses for every quarter this year and has lost more than $11 billion for the year as a whole. Indeed, Merrill's decision to be taken over by Bank of America seems to have been the only thing that saved Merrill from collapse. Clearly, the performance of Merrill's top executives throughout Merrill's abysmal year in no way justifies significant bonuses for its top executives, including the CEO."

Fair or not, the man-on-the-street and the hundreds of thousands made jobless during the fall-out from the financial crisis would concur.

Thain, not surprisingly, has since decided that he doesn't need a bonus after all. This will be small comfort to the estimated 30,000 BofA/Merrill staff set to receive pink slips during the forthcoming restructuring of the merged banks' operations