Ken Lewis' Year Without Pay

Sorry, no paycheck for you. That's the unprecedented demand put on Bank of America (BAC) CEO Ken Lewis by the Treasury's pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. According to The Wall Street Journal, the BoA chief has been asked to give back the roughly $1 million he's collected so far this year and forgo another $1.5 million still due to him. Oh, and no 2009 bonus either. But don't feel too bad for Lewis. "Mr. Feinberg pushed for the deal because he thought the package of retirement benefits and unvested stock Mr. Lewis takes with him when he steps down at year's end—currently worth at least $69.3 million, according to securities filings—was large enough, and possibly too big," the newspaper writes. While Lewis "voluntarily agreed" to the arrangement without much fuss, others on Wall Street were outraged. "This is punitive," exclaimed banking analyst Nancy Bush of NAB Research.

The New York Times notes that the Lewis forfeiture comes as the controversy around BoA's Merrill Lynch acquisition intensifies. Citing sources, the NYT says BoA will turn over documents implicating Wall Street law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in a massive shareholder cover-up. The firm "initially advised Bank of America to withhold information about the perilous state of Merrill from the bank’s shareholders, but later advised it to alert federal officials to the growing losses, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter," the newspaper writes.

The worst of the recession is over for Google (GOOG), the business press are declaring this morning. The Net juggernaut astounded Wall Street with a recession-defying third quarter profit on Thursday. Sales were up 7 percent and net profit rose a whopping 27 percent to $1.64 billion from the year earlier period thanks to a solid rebound in online advertising. "While there's obviously a lot of uncertainty about the pace of economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and we're seeing lots of signs of that in all of the industries that we pay attention to," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on a conference call following the results, the WSJ reports. The Financial Times takes the statement a step further, paraphrasing Schmidt as saying "the advertising revival appeared to have spread across the Internet more broadly." According to the NYT, Google plans to rehire thousands and once again rev up the acquisitions and investment. "Mr. Schmidt said that while some uncertainty remained about the pace of the recovery, Google is 'very optimistic about the future. We now have the business confidence to invest heavily in the next phase of innovation,'” the newspaper writes.

If you believe the Lazarus-like recovery of the investment banks means all is rosy in the world of finance think again. As the Financial Times outlines, Citigroup's (C) poor figures, when compared to Goldman Sachs's (GS) bumper profits, demonstrates "the gap between the financial resilience of Wall Street and the woes of Main Street, fresh evidence that two Americas are emerging from the crisis." Citi's seventh loss in eight quarters is bad news for the bank and its shareholders but is worse for the rest of America and the bank's performance is due to consumers continuing to fall behind on credit card bills and mortgage payments. And it's bad news for the Obama administration as well. News stories of record banking bonuses will hardly help win public support for further financial sector stimulus packages should the retail banking industry prove more fragile than it currently does.

Is it love on the rocks for the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger? The WSJ writes that the move to create a music industry powerhouse is facing "stiff resistance" from the Justice Department that could force the two companies to make major concessions if they want to avoid having the deal blocked. The merger is the first to come under the scrutiny of the Obama administration and its tough anti-trust stance. "The Ticketmaster-Live Nation deal is widely regarded as a bellwether of the department's attitude toward such potential deals as Comcast Corp.'s proposal to take a majority stake in General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal. Like the proposed Ticketmaster-Live Nation alliance, a Comcast-NBC deal would represent 'vertical integration,' in which several links in the chain between producer and consumer are controlled by a single entity," writes the WSJ.

The sudden death on Wednesday of Lazard Ltd. (LAZ) Chief Executive Bruce Wasserstein is triggering what the WSJ calls the "death payout." And, it's a big one, coming in at a $188 million payday for his heirs. "Mr. Wasserstein's pay package underscored a fact of life at Lazard: In addition to being the public face of the investment-banking firm, Mr. Wasserstein received the lion's share of its pay." Wasserstein's total compensation in 2008 topped $20 million, exceeding "the combined pay of the next four Lazard officers by nearly $3 million."