Are CEOs Paid Too Much?

i was talked to a director on the board and said that the money paid to CEOs is too high. I was told that my pea brain was too little too understand why they get paid so much and to leave before he called security. I work as a cleaner.

"Secondly, CEOs in the FIRE sector tend to receive a larger part of their compensation as stock (usually restricted stock). In actuality, that structure helps wed executives' interests with those of shareholders:

Clearly, this baseless assertion is demonstrably false, as anyone can see by looking at the current situation. All this does is give management incentive to spend their time manipulating their companies stock price instead of, you know, actually running their business.

"OFF WITH THEIR HEADS"
Jail will not be enough for these men. I cannot believe people are not demanding these men PAY UP for their mistakes. These CEO???s are as bad as terrorists. They have robbed us of our 401K???s, our nest eggs. Yet, they can sit on their yacht???s with their plastic surgery overdone wives and ungrateful trust fund kids enjoying the finer things in life on our misery and their $20 million dollar bonuses, on top of their million dollar salaries. WAKE UP AMERICA, AND DEMAND that they be held accountable for their actions, not just by jail. Hit them where it hurts, their wallets. WHAT HAS TO HAPPEN - They should each take their salaries & their bonuses from 2007 & 2008 and divi it up among every American family who made or makes less than $250K a year. That is fair considering American???s are losing their jobs, their homes and can???t even afford a decent meal for themselves or their families. All while these men lie, cheat and steal when we trusted them with our nest eggs and livelihoods. Their combined salaries and bonuses for both 2007 & 2008 total could help millions of American???s out. It???s time WE STAND UP AND DEMAND these CEO???s to pay us back. Why just demand white collar jail that won???t be punishment enough, they need to repay with more than just jail, but also with their wallets.

*OFF WITH THEIR HEADS*
Jail will not be enough for these men. I cannot believe people are not demanding these men PAY UP for their mistakes. These CEO???s are as bad as terrorists. They have robbed us of our 401K???s, our nest eggs. Yet, they can sit on their yacht???s with their plastic surgery overdone wives and ungrateful trust fund kids enjoying the finer things in life on our misery and their $20 million dollar bonuses, on top of their million dollar salaries. WAKE UP AMERICA, AND DEMAND that they be held accountable for their actions, not just by jail. Hit them where it hurts, their wallets. WHAT HAS TO HAPPEN - They should each take their salaries & their bonuses from 2007 & 2008 and divi it up among every American family who made or makes less than $250K a year. That is fair considering American???s are losing their jobs, their homes and can???t even afford a decent meal for themselves or their families. All while these men lie, cheat and steal when we trusted them with our nest eggs and livelihoods. Their combined salaries and bonuses for both 2007 & 2008 total could help millions of American???s out. It???s time WE STAND UP AND DEMAND these CEO???s to pay us back. Why just demand white collar jail that won???t be punishment enough, they need to repay with more than just jail, but also with their wallets.

Of course they are paid too much. They don't own the companies. The are in charge, along with an overpaid incestuous Board of Directors, of running a publically traded company. The profits should be returned to the real owners - the stockholders. The top management's pay should be tied to the pay of the lowest level employee - just like Ben & Jerry's - and most of the profit should go to the shareholders - and also a portion should be shared amongst all of the employees. Corporations shouldn't be allowed to become huge international cartels. Corporations should be limited in scope and should be routinely dissolved every 20-30 years with the wealth distributed to the shareholders and employees.

CEO's as a rule are paid too much. But, when they receive these outlandish bonuses, perks when their leadship has failded is criminal. Then, add to that they received these undeserved bonuses with taxpayer money should be considered fraud.
I do wish there was someway these egotistical, immoral people would face criminal charges, or, at the least, be
made to pay back every taxpayer cent.

I am a professional engineer making 100K. I am lucky to have a good job. I have a masters degree and must be conscious of safety and cost on all my projects. I'm sure I would be vigorously flamed if I suggested what these executives should be paid but when you get north of 1 million a year I expect genius. Instead we get unmitigated greed. You can't blame the CEOs. They are only scum afterall. The directors are to blame for allowing the abuse but they collude with the executives and cling to enough stock to control the votes and secure their positions. It is a shame that the only way to control them is to shun their products an hurt so many innocent people along with them.

Welcome to AS I SEE IT, by Mike "Mainer Mike" Brown, With The Most Comprehensive Commentary Your Day Can't Do WIthout.

Are CEO'S paid too much? That is the question. Obviously, they are. Anyone who disagrees should take a look at the small banks in our country, who are generally doing just fine. Apparently, they knew what they were doing much more than these hot shots at the big banks. You would think that highly educated people like these would know how to run a bank. Now the average person must bail them out. It's frusterating, because somebody who owns a small business won't get bailed out if it goes under. But if we don't shell out money to these banks, our economy will certainly worsen. And to make things worse, these executives were using company jets, all well knowing that their banks were suffering. They even had expensive parties after recieving bail-out money. President Obama, a while back, stated that we all need to sacrifice to get out of this economic mess. Oh really? Why should the everday person sacrifice, it should be the CEO's! There the ones who messed up and keep taking and taking!

That's AS I SEE IT. I'm Mike "Mainer Mike" Brown.

CEO dont deserve what they make. It is fact that we continue to reward Executives based on encouraging the wrong behaviors. The author only touches on the fact that we are rewarding execs on very short term returns. Short term in financial terms is within a Fiscal Year. We are not even talking about 12 months performance....but lets drive a behavior during a fiscal year. This is an insane way to measure execs. The very best run companies (many are privately held) are companies that focus and pay exec on LONG TERM thinking. Execs, especially in the finance industry are so richly rewarded they dont care about future years and the over all impacts their decision make. They dont need to be. I can, as an exec, implement plans and policies that so manipulate short term results, and so richly reward me in that time that I can last 2-3 years and make so much money.....it make no difference what carnage remains after my departure. Keep in mind that many of these execs are not even the best or the brightest...even in their own companies. They are the ones that happened to be best at "manipulating" the facts and their own communications style that allowed them to rise to the top levels. There are likely many brighter people as well as more honest and ethical people that were not able to rise to the top posts. There is much more to say on this but the facts are unequivolcal....executives (CEO's) are overpaid in all industries but especially financial sectors....and the boards the supervise them have been largely "out to lunch" in their oversight. Short story on my last comment is this: "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" is likely the mantra from the board room. CEO's sit on multiple boards, so inevitably they are the oversight within a very closed system of obversight. If Government does not begin inserting themselves, who will? Industries have been incapable of self governing. CEO to individual contributor pay disparity has risen from something like 40:1, to now closer to 360:1. Do we really believe that CEO value has risen that much in the past 20 years? Hardly. It is likely just the opposite. Lets fix it...one way or another.

Absolutely!!! Especially when they have all ( well just about all) been doing a HORRIBLE job!!!

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Ah,,,Incentive. Yes, we are all pavlovian in our self-gratifying wallow. "I did this, gimme" When you give your all to a company, do they appreciate it? No. You are but a small cog in the machine. If you are among the "in" crowd, you eill be "compensated" for your contribution to the business. Huh?
This is the way of the jew. And to be thwarted, halted, and abolished. Yeah, I said "jew"., what about it?
You mongering bastards have been raping us for too long. Your ways are the problem. Funny, how the rest of the world does'nt allow your kind of manipulation

While I understand the oppertunities a captalistic economy provides to those who put out extra effort to get ahead, I have difficulty understanding how many extra hours a CEO must work to make a million dollar salary verses a clerk who puts in 40 hours a week @ $12.00 an hour. 24 hours a day X 365 days a year X $12.00 = $105,120.00. Are the days longer in the penthouse? Now tell me how the CEO can succeed without the effort of the clerk?

I think the article suggests reasonable but very limited solutions. Comments posted below add valuable additional steps that need to be taken. This article may not be the best in terms of solutions provided but it is not entertainment journalism. At least the author is not ranting about how it is not right for government to tell companies how to run their business as is the case in most msm outlets. Finally, if anyone tells you that you are too stupid to understand these "complex" issues and that there is this one person who is the only one capable of understanding and fixing this mess (remember that fraudster Paulson ??), they are pulling one on you. Anyone can understand these issues if they are willing to spend the time and effort researching all that is going on. The public has been fulled by businessmen, poiliticians and media into supporting large scale outflow of cold hard cash from the treasury to these fraud companies.

This is another filler article with no facts and poor theory as is so common in economics. The press forgets that stockholders own the company and have consistently rubber stamped the board's compensation proposals. Managers of public corporations are employees NOT ENTREPRENUERS. The techniques used to boost earnings are well known and can be duplicted using a computer program. Public corporations should limit executive pay to reasonalbe ratios of 10 - 15 times the averabe employee pjay. If the want more pay raise the employee wages. Stock options for executives should be the same as those for mon-management employees. If there are no stock options for employees then there are none for the executives. If employees receive 100 share then the executives receive shares in the same ratio as their salaries to employees, 10 - 15 times the shares received by an individual employee. Ther should be no golden paracutes, executives should be governed by the same rules as any other employee. There is a major problem with stock ownership and the voting of shares. Mutual funds own large numbers of share so investors should have some say over how those shares are voted. As I understand it, mutual funds use third parties who supposedly study the companies proposals and decide how the shares are to be voted. I believe that they rubber stamp the proposals just as many individual stock holders do. The voting of mutual fund shares needs to be changed, a difficult task I know. Finally the compensation committee of the board should consist of 1 board member, a nonj-manament employee and private stock holder with less than 1000 shares. This would, hopefullly, provide some common sense and balance when considering executive pay.

This tepid piece of non-think journalism entirely misses the point, or fails to appreciate the points it inadvertently does make. First non-point: ???financial incentives are the heart of capitalism and free markets.??? But what the writer euphemistically terms ???financial incentives??? turns out to be based on the fool???s gold of today???s short-term profit turned tomorrow???s toxic assets. And ???free markets??? really aren???t free at all, when the same people (who rant like Rick Santelli without a pacifier) still demand to be richly compensated for FAILURE ??? in many cases the biggest FAILURES of their kind in the history of the world. So much for ???financial incentives,??? ???free markets,??? and while I???m at it ???capitalism.??? These so-called capitalists have invented a fail-safe system that even the Politburo of the old Soviet Union would have coveted in their fondest wet dreams.

Give me a break. Newsweek has no solutions. It and the entire genre of solipsistic entertainment-journalism will keep cranking out their self-serving illusions until the world???s entire financial system collapses, and planet earth along with it. And their toady execs will still be demanding ??? you got it -- bonuses!

According to Exxon Mobil???s financial statements, the CEO, R.W. Tillerson, owns 929,149 shares of company stock. That???s close to $60 million at current XOM share prices. So basically the CEO is the biggest shareholder at XOM. It???s probably hard for him to make any business decision without thinking of its impact on his assets. Laying-off a few thousand employees during a recession might be rightly justified in order to ???realign the cost structure of the company with current demand forecasts???. But isn???t it coincidental that it also maintains the profit margin at a constant percentage even as revenues decline, thus enabling the dividend yield to remain constant for shareholders? Some employees lose so that shareholders win, but the biggest shareholders win the biggest. Some of those employees may have even had a wealth of knowledge in their heads, but its always easier when looking through the lens of financial analysis to see the immediate hard savings while being blind to the long term immeasurable costs such as loss of institutional knowledge and decline in productivity due to fear. Does anybody else see a conflict of interest when you allow your CEO to be your biggest shareholder?