The big news of the day from the world of politics is that President Obama plans to cap executive pay at banks that take bailout money in the next round of emergency cash payments. This is not popular with the executive class:
“That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.”
Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief executives and other senior executives $500,000 or less in total compensation. He said such limits will make it hard for the companies to recruit and keep executives, most of whom could earn more money at other firms.
My immediate reaction to this: Good.
In fact, the fact that Mr. Reda and his CEO friends think they ought to be able to dictate the terms under which they will graciously allow the US taxpayers to rescue them from the galaxy-swallowing financial black hole that they created through their own arrogance and incompetence only strengthens my conviction that the sooner these assholes are packed off to a desert island where they use monkey crap as currency, the better.
The current executives won’t deign to work for half a million a year? Fantastic. Let’s drop the limit to a quarter-million, just to be safe. The people running Wall Street the last twenty years shouldn’t be allowed to keep the bank in an elementary-school game of Monopoly, let alone an actual financial institution.
$500,000 is “draconian?” No, “draconian” would be telling them to go live in the foreclosed trailer homes of the people who have lost their jobs because of the gross mismanagement of, well, pretty much everything the financier class has touched in the last decade or two. $500,000 is about three orders of magnitude more than these executives deserve.