The title of this post doesn't sound too bad, huh? NYSE chairman resigns...How about this, he quits a day after it was announced he recieved a $139.5 Million dollar bonus about a month ago! Yes, almost 140 million dollar bonus!! and get this... he may get a $10 million dollar severance package! and get this... after 9/11 he got the stock market up and running after 6 days, he got a $5 million dollar bonus! -- click this link for complete article click this link for google news articles ---
That'll learn him. Out you go. You'll just have to get by on $140 mill. Oh, and you can continue to sit on the compensation committees of other boards. And lets work out a sererance, of course. Grrrrr!!! No matter what your political stripe -- this sort of excess must infuriate you! Its mega ceo's like this that give the other 2% a bad name!
Yeah, executive salary has to be one of the real market problems out there today. I have no problems when guys that really save companies or encourage great growth take home huge checks... but when people who have been ineffective or merely adequate take home checks that are so disproportionate to the generality of their employees (even skilled ones)... then I think something's wrong. A problem of the wolf guarding the hen house, though I don't really know a way you can fix it. You don't want to regulate top salaries, etc... and it's not like the shame factor has much of an effect when you're banking a fortune .
Of course the NYSE is a private company whose shareholders decided this was fair compensation. Would I have paid him that much? I don't know enough about how much business he brought the NYSE (i.e, getting more foreign companies listed, etc.) but I figure if the shareholders (and in this case the seat holders aren't complete morons) pay him $140, they are the only that can really b**ch about it.
Not really, it's the representatives of the shareholders who made that decision, so if I was a smaller shareholder, I would really be more mad at these representatives than at this Grasso dude. After all, he just took what he could get. One of my professors cited this comment today: "Now we got the pig out of the trough, we just need to find out who filled the trough!"