Dick Margulis wrote:
> I'm a People's Bank retail customer. When I moved to Connecticut, I
> was a veteran of opening accounts at small, community-based banks only
> to have them absorbed by merger into larger and less customer-focused
> institutions. So I interviewed people at all of my neighborhood banks
> to find out about their vulnerability to such takeovers. People's Bank
> impressed me with their line that the depositors owned the bank and
> the board was committed to never selling out. Uh-huh. I drank the Kool-
> Aid.

> So when they decided to let us depositors vote on whether to go
> forward with their big public offering, I was inclined to vote no,
> knowing full well that my vote wouldn't count for much. At the same
> time, they offered to sweeten the deal by letting depositors purchase
> shares at $20. The accompanying material indicated that the stock had
> been trading in the $40 range, so this sounded like a good deal. If
> I'd read all the exceedingly voluminous fine print, I might also have
> learned that the $40 price was from before the 21:10 stock split.

> Anyway, sure, I hedged my bet and bought some stock, not enough to
> hurt myself, I'm happy to say. And it's been downhill ever since.

> Now the board has decided to reward top executives for, um, the
> performance of the stock???? I dunno. What, exactly, ARE we rewarding
> them for? Tell me again what John Klein has done to deserve $44
> million as a retention bonus.