Bonus Watch '12: Jefferies Wonders Aloud How Its Ass Tastes

Jefferies set aside $870 million in the first six months of its fiscal year, enough to pay its 3,809 employees an average of $228,407. Goldman Sachs set aside $225,789 for each of its 32,300 workers. Average pay for the 26,553 people in JPMorgan’s investment bank was $184,989, or at least 18 percent less than Jefferies’s and Goldman Sachs’s reported figures. It was 10 percent less than both in fiscal 2011...Goldman Sachs, run by Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein, 57, includes consultants and temporary staff when reporting headcount. Jefferies, which has been luring talent from larger rivals to expand in the wake of 2008’s credit crisis, tallies only full-time workers in its disclosures. Jefferies’s reported headcount would expand by 10 percent to 15 percent if the firm included temporary workers, said a person with direct knowledge of the figures who requested anonymity because the information isn’t public. While that would place the firm’s average pay per employee below Goldman Sachs’s, it still exceeds JPMorgan’s and Morgan Stanley's.  [Bloomberg]