Overpaid banking CEOs have done a better job at collapsing the economy than overpaid oil CEOs have at damaging the environment.

With the economy in the ****ter, there's a temporary drop in oil consumption, so in a really LOL way Wall Street actually helped the environment.

We could make a law that every shareholder has to vote on the CEO's pay every year (with votes being made public LDO). There can be a multiple choice.


A.) CEO gets 14x the average workers wage, and standard employee pension
B.) CEO compensation package proposed by the board of directors
C.) CEO compensation package proposed by the CEO\management team
D.) Package A with some equity based bonus
E.) Package A with some cash bonus

I'm guessing B would win almost all the time at the larger publicly traded companies FWIW.

I wouldn't mind this if it wasn't twisted to only benefit the CEO. For example:
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/4076776?f=alerts

He and many others have been acquitted on the "Well how should I know? I'm just the CEO."

LOL have you heard of Sarbanes-Oxley? The Scrushy trangressions occurred before that law was passed. If it was law when those transgression occurred he'd be in the slammer most likely.

Every effort to curb executive compensation has failed. Attack cash compensation, they go to options. Attack in the money options, they shift to out of the money options and just reset the option price whenever the stock goes down. Oh and add ridiculous golden parachutes and pension/retirement packages.

The only thing that will ever actually work is making it easier for shareholders to sue. Currently these claims are thrown out under the business judgement rule, so you have to argue waste, which is impossible (Mike Ovitz, $140m for 1 year at Disney, no waste says DE Chancery!). And you have to put personal assets on the table.

CC Sabatihia way overpaid compared to this guy.... at least the oil guy can pony up when pressure is on..... Sabathiniathia folds

Have you ever heard of Foxconn? They probably are quite well paid compared to other Chinese workers.

Steve Jobs was paid $1/yr since 1998. He wasn't one of the greedy CEOs.

So what? What he did was still illegal before SOX, and he got away with it because the jury was stupid enough to be convinced that a CEO doesn't know where his revenue is coming from.

Ok if you say so but not really. It wasn't a crime and one point of Sarbanes-Oxley was to make this a crime ldo.

So the solution to whatever problem there is here (not convinced there really is one btw) is to make it easier for shareholders to sue? How should we determine when a CEO is overpaid IE what grounds for a lawsuit would you add?

It wasn't a crime to knowingly give incorrect financial statements to the SEC before SOX?

Before SOX you had to prove it was knowingly done, now signing off on the financial statments and having grossly error prone financial statements can be sufficient to put a CEO in the slammer. In other words the burden of proof that existed before SOX does not exist now.