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Hereâ€s some advice for any investment banker that wants to avoid seeing his bonus slashed this year: get a job at Goldman. Goldman Sachs Group set aside $16.9 billion in the first nine months of the year to pay its employees, Bloomberg points out here. That is $400 million more than the bonanza the firm doled out in all of last year. It works out to $565,730 for each of Goldmanâ€s nearly 30,000 employees, a 4% boost from the same period last year. Some of them, of course, like star investor Mark McGoldrick, skew the scale a bit. He pulled in $70 million last year. (Depending on how you look at it, that could make you feel not so bad, or even worse.) Of course, only Goldman pays out this kind of money, which is about equal on an annual basis to the gross domestic product of Lebanon. And only Goldman hands out salary increases in a year that is turning into an annus horribilis for Wall Street. This story in the Wall Street Journal today on the companyâ€s third-quarter results helps explain why.