“CEOs were paid well because their buddies were on the corporate boards.”
I don’t disagree that at some corporations this may have been true. But, the fact that CEOs were making big bucks has very little to do with the stock market crash. Moreover. Wall Street operated on low salaries and year end bonus’. There’s nothing unusual about this. The mail boys making 600,000 a year at Goldman Sachs certainly didn’t complain.
Inflating the housing bubble with trillions of dollars of Fed guaranteed sub prime mortgages crashed the financial sector. The guy writing this retirement lament should focus on those villains.
Sorry, but the mortgage market wasn't the only sector of the economy 'bubble-ized' by Fed monetary policy. Just about the entire economy was impacted, and it made for oversized bonuses for CEOs - stocks were bid up because the world was awash in cash looking for a return (such as what we saw in commodities last year).
But my original point stands - the increase in CEO compensation was way greater than the increase in market capitalization. And it's become almost impossible to break the stranglehold of the oligarchy on the corporate domain. Which is how we get government policies that skin working stiffs, such as the proposed cap-and-trade - a lot of corporations actually like the concept because it will be a barrier to entry for a lot of potential competitors.