Now about the planned $70B 'bonuses' on Wall St. ... ...

Post #298,594 by Ashton 10/29/08 9:58:59 PM Reply	Now about the planned $70B 'bonuses' on Wall St. ... ... You are soo-oo immersed in the happy-Freedom talk "Leave it All ... to Us Bizness Pros" Ayn-al mantra of pre-September 2008. You cherry-pick an instance with extremely modest 'pay' (other perks??) versus the Obscene levels of today/yesterday: which seems to be a decent ROI. Nary a peep, Beep re the slash/burn ones whose Parachutes were locked in with No Required Performance == Merit specified. And the retirement funds raided during the massacree. Yep, wallow in those outliers -- the remaining few, the despised, the atypical: who do their jobs well and make so many others look like what they Are. Doesn't matter about the inviolability of your fav Formulas (or mine) in an enviroment as financially-fucked as this one is (nor is this more than the beginning, given all those unregistered derivatives: making an actual bottom of it all -??- unguessable.) I suspect that there Shall be some unprecedented New RulesÂ; never mind the -isms and alarums and crocodile tears of the Free Market chimera and its acolytes. Let us prey; sometimes it is satisfying. Keep the Faith. Baby.
Post #298,599 by beepster 10/29/08 10:52:25 PM Reply	The point is who decides? You? Some inside the beltway "scholar"? A democrat? A republican? Who, exactly, decides what is "fair" and what is not? About the best you can hope for is some mechanism where the shareholders vote to approve. You are also cherry picking and creating generalizations...so fair is fair.
Post #298,600 by Another Scott 10/29/08 11:23:07 PM Reply	Presently, the CEO decides. In olden days, I think the Board of Directors decided. These days, they mostly seem to be rubber-stamps for the CEO and his/her Compensation Committee, so there's little wonder that CEO pay has exploded. Who decides? Maybe someone other than the CEOs for a change? But more than that, I reject the premise that companies have to pay CEOs millions or tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year in salary and other compensation. The largest industrial organization in the world is the US Department of Defense. ($515B+ in FY09). The head of the DOD - the Secretary of Defense - makes something like $191k a year. "Oh, but that's different..." Sure. But it shows that qualified people can be found to do complicated jobs that involve millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars for salaries much less than $1M per year. Companies who paid their executives more weren't looking out for the owners and the health of the company as a whole. BTW, Jack Welch seems to finally agree: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95038679 FWIW. Cheers, Scott.
Post #298,614 by boxley 10/30/08 9:51:00 AM Reply	so, should YOU decide? Collective you? ceo pay shall never exceed $formulae put hb1ceo.com contractors in all the slots not sure it would make a difference to be honest with you. In our company it wouldnt work. Dunno what the boss's pay is, but he earns it. thanx, bill if lemmy and god had a wrestling match who would win?
Post #298,672 by mhuber 10/31/08 8:01:43 AM Reply	Well, there's the rub Some CEOs are worth big $. But the current system pays the worthless CEO who drives a decent company into the ground (esp. if he does it one great quarter at a time) the same tens or hundreds of millions as it pays a dedicated genius who pulls a dying company from its death spiral into thriving profitability. Actually, I suspect the good ones make less than the looters. And even that dedicated genius - can't she get by on $10M or so per year? Does anybody really work harder for the second hundred mill? Is there an effective market where the best CEOs go to the highest bidder? I don't see it.

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