Stuffing Their Pockets (For America's CEOs, a very lucrative recession)

Newsweek ^ | 09/06/2010 | Rana Foroohar

[SeekAndFind]

One of the most startling things about the post-crisis landscape is how tone-deaf the wealthiest Americans remain to outrage over their Croesus-like pay packages. The award for complete obliviousness would have to go to Blackstone cofounder Stephen Schwarzman, who earlier this summer compared government attempts to raise taxes on financiers such as himself to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Silver medals should certainly be handed out to the many executives and corporate lawyers who were grousing last week about the new Dodd-Frank bill, which includes a rule requiring companies to disclose the difference in pay between their chief executive and their lowest-level workers. It would be a “logistical nightmare,” these titans of industry wailed, for firms to compile this information.

Well, maybe, but if you issue pay stubs, surely you can tally them up (and perhaps keep a few more workers on board to do just that). The real nightmare will be when the public sees the numbers, which will illuminate just how egregious the U.S. pay gap has become. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank based in Washington, the average S&P 500 CEO takes home 263 times what his cheapest laborer does. While CEO pay is indeed down from its pre-crisis highs in 2007, it’s still double what it was in the 1990s, and eight times the level in the 1950s.

[Castlebar]

BP comes to mind.

Stock tanked.

CEO fired.

[proxy_user]

Are you replying to post 47, or the first one I made?

[Oceander]

No, the argument is not "flawed" it is merely incomplete inasmuch as I didn't address all of the various market distortions that might apply; however, since I prefaced everything with "for example" it should have been obvious that I was intentionally sketching only a partial analysis - I'm not getting paid for a full academic analysis, so you won't be getting that.

[expat_panama]

"...too many companies employ high-paid turkeys..."

--and so that means we're supposed to hate American capitalism?  Hardly  The fact that people are free to spend money as they see fit it a good thing, and in America it's usually spent very wisely because Americans are exceptional.

[expat_panama]

"...there are few if any examples of the free market in large corporate governance."

Hey guy, most hiring and most private buying and selling in the US is done by, though, or with big corporations --and American capitalism is overwhelmingly free and good.   OK, anyone can find things about it they don't like about it but without hard clear solutions it's all just a bunch of crybaby griping.

Complainers are going to have to come up with something better or leave 'corporate governance' to overpaid CEO's like myself and find something else to keep busy with.

[starlifter]

Stock would have tanked given the circumstances.

CEO was inept and tone deaf during the spill. He ended his career withthem when he whined “I want to get my life back.”

[starlifter]

Academics [sic] hate being told their arguments are flawed.

Thanks for playing.

[starlifter]

Sorry for being ambiguous. I was referring to your #36.

[Oceander]

Academics [sic] hate being told their arguments are flawed.

Thanks for playing.

As I'm not an academic, you must be referring to yourself. Sorry you can't deal with the fact that your argument was flawed.