The broken system of CEO pay

There's been a lot of heated debate over sky-high corporate compensation, but little information about how those immense salaries are agreed to.

Supporters of the current system will point out that those CEO's don't dictate their salary. It is negotiated in a free-market system.

Is that the whole story? No. In fact that is only a half-truth.

 Since 1950 the ratio of CEO to employee pay has widened 1000%.
   In 1950 CEO's were making 20 times the average employee's pay. Now they are making 204 times the average employee's salary. This is a purely American (and English) trend.

 top executives of major companies in Europe, Japan, and South Korea earn around one-tenth as much as CEOs in the United States.

 CEO's, who have never been known for modesty, like to say that they are worth it. The WSJ defends the salary disparity by comparing it to major league baseball pitchers.
   But is that an accurate comparison? No, it isn't.

 Studies have found no correlation between executive pay and corporate performance.
   In fact, several studies have found a negative correlation between executive pay and corporate performance. Example studies can be found here and here.
   When Bob Nardelli stepped down as CEO of Home Depot, he pocketed $240 million despite his company's stock price declining 40%.
   What about the "superstar CEO" that the WSJ talks about? Well, that's a myth too. One study showed that 10% of companies that paid their CEO's the most underperformed the market by an average of 8%.

  In fact, there is only one correlation that can be proven concerning CEO pay: how many people they fire.

The CEOs who laid off the most employees during the recession are also the CEOs who took home the biggest pay checks, according to a study released last week. CEOs of the 50 U.S. firms that slashed the most jobs between November 2008 and April 2010 took in 42 percent more than the average CEO at an S&P firm, according to the 17th annual Executive Excess study by the Institute for Policy Studies. The study also found that 36 of the 50 layoff leaders “announced their mass layoffs at a time of positive earnings reports,” suggesting a trend of “squeezing workers to boost profits and maintain high CEO pay.”

 It's important to point out that while Wall Street is famous for overpaying, Silicon Valley is actually a bigger criminal in this regard.  

  This brings up the obvious question of: who are these people who agree to pay these CEO's such enormous salaries for failing?
   That would be the corporate directors.

 If anyone were putting a check on CEO pay, these sorts of practices would be standard, but they aren't for a simple reason. The corporate directors who are supposed to be holding down CEO pay for the benefit of the shareholders are generally buddies of the CEOs.

 It's called cronyism, and it is rampant in corporate America. Just look at who sits on who's board of directors.
   A good example of this is JP Morgan Chase's CEO Jamie Dimon, who recieved a 74% raise in the same year his bank paid $20 Billion in fines for illegal activities.
   Sitting at the chair of the board of directors was...Jamie Dimon. Other directors on the board were also highly paid CEO's.

  So how do directors come up with numbers for these huge salaries? It's called "benchmarking". What it involves is the board hires a consultant to survey a peer group's pay range, thus using it as a benchmark.
   So far, so good, right? Unfortunately, no.

 Well, except just as all the children at Lake Woebegone are above average, no board likes setting a target below peer group norms. I have heard of numerous examples of targets being set somewhere in the top half (66th percentile, top quarter, top 20%), hardly any at the mean, and none I know of below average.

 With this built-in bias you can see how CEO pay will far outpace inflation. To make matters worse, some boards use peer group's that stretch the definition of "peers" in order to justify even higher pay.
    Why would they do that?

 Some boards, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, remain convinced of what Elson calls “superstar theory”: they think that C.E.O.s can work their magic anywhere, and must be overpaid to stay. In addition, Elson said, “if you pay below average, it makes it look as if you’d hired a below-average C.E.O., and what board wants that?”

  Of course shareholders could put a stop to this, but shareholders are disenfranchised. Passive investors in ETFs and Index Funds account for 22% of the market, and they only care about performance. They couldn't care less about who runs a company.
   Every once in a while the shareholders will put up a fight, but it isn't unusual for the board to simply ignore the votes of the shareholders.
   After all, board members are spending shareholder money, not their own.

  All the SEC has done about these outrageous compensation packages is to insist that it be transparent. As if to embarrass the directors into being more responsive.
   But it begs the question: are the people that are handing out these hundred million dollar salaries beyond shame?

  Speaking of shame, we should stop here to note how right-wingers will be the first ones rushing to defend the salaries of these overpaid CEO's. They will accuse anyone who complains of jealousy, and that they deserve to be paid 204 times the salary of their average employee.
   In the very same breath these same right-wingers will denounce auto factory workers for making $30 an hour. Why? Because that is too much money. The contradictions of this hypocritical illogic never seems to occur to them.

  When I was growing up public school teacher salaries used to be the butt of jokes for comedians. Now right-wingers are demanding they be slashed because they are "too high".
   Their logic seems to be “above average pay is bad, except for the 1%”.

Why does CEO pay matter to me?

 For starters, studies show that sky-high CEO pay cascades down to other executives that also get overpaid. This is a key ingredient in pay inequality.
  Secondly, the structure of their compensation encourages them to lay off employees, making it hard for all us workers.
   Thirdly, its simply bad for business, thus making it less likely the companies will expand hiring.
   There are other reasons.

 Because of the yawning gap between the leaders and the led, employee morale is suffering, talented performers’ loyalty is evaporating, and strategy and execution is suffering at American companies.

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thanatokephaloides's picture

..... would be to de-speculate corporate common stocks. The first sub-step here would be to tax dividends more favorably than share price arbitrage gains. Once the companies actually have to turn profits and put them in shareholders' hands, it will be the magnitude of those dividends which will determine CEO salaries rather than the easily inflated stock share prices which drive CEO pay today.

The massive overpayment of CEOs is just one more "gift that keeps on giving" courtesy of the Wall Street Casino.

Bad

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

@thanatokephaloides
should be restoring the law that made corporate buybacks of shares illegal. A substantial portion of the market's increase has been caused by these actions to the benefit of CEOs exercising options.

Then tax all income, earned, capital gains, and dividends, at the same rate. (I'd make an exception for public borrowing.) There is no reason to put an additional burden on a new, rapidly developing company reinvesting its earnings compared to an established company with a consistent market share paying dividends.

If you want to reduce speculation put a small tax on equity trades and a smaller tax on derivative trades.

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thanatokephaloides's picture

@FuturePassed

Then tax all income, earned, capital gains, and dividends, at the same rate. (I'd make an exception for public borrowing.)

That would still work. Right now, taxation favors share arbitrage gains massively, with easily seen results.

There is no reason to put an additional burden on a new, rapidly developing company reinvesting its earnings compared to an established company with a consistent market share paying dividends.

Earnings reinvestment is an expense. One that is nearly always justified, but an expense nonetheless. Dividends need to be paid from net profits, after all such expenses.

One thing that is never a legitimate expense (as some of our fellow commenters have pointed out) is buybacks of common stock, a technique that used to be banned but is now much favored by these overpaid CEOs.

And yes, let's impose some sort of sales taxation on share and derivative trades. We peons have to pay sales tax when we buy stuff; why not Wall Street?

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

@thanatokephaloides

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SnappleBC's picture

American CEO's make more than anywhere else in the world... in most cases A LOT more.

That means there is a pool of roughly 6.5 billion human beings out there... most of whom would take the job for a lot less than is being offered to American CEO's. You cannot convince me that on a global basis there aren't some very competent CEO's.

Oh wait. We can't outsource CEO jobs. That's only for us worker bees.

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A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard

karl pearson's picture

When I was growing up public school teacher salaries used to be the butt of jokes for comedians. Now right-wingers are demanding they be slashed because they are "too high".

Rather than be jealous of Trump, right-wingers are jealous of the school teacher or auto worker who has decent pay and benefits. (Unions have a lot to do with these conditions.) Trumpsters know they are never going to have the luxuries of a Donald Trump, but they see the teacher/auto worker closer to their own economic status, so they resent the decent pay and benefits. Years ago, the media used to report instances of excessive pay, but that is long gone. Maybe this video explains why:

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@karl pearson

They always tell us "you get what you pay for". "Good talent is expensive." When they talk about teachers and auto workers, funny how none of that applies.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

@dkmich Funny how overpaid CEOs can tank a company and make any number of other moves that would have a mere peon out on the their ass and then not only leave with a "golden parachute" but fall upwards into an even better (and richer) job.

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Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

@Dr. John Carpenter
America's corporate titans manage so much of the nation's wealth and power, they have become virtually untouchable. It's not a question how much they get paid, it's a question of how much they can steal.

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native

earthling1's picture

prohibit deducting CEO pay from Corporate revenues? When profits plummet, the stockholders will take notice.

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

enhydra lutris's picture

@earthling1
has no real say in the matter except for the rare case of a closely held corp that pays no dividends and pays its owner-executive all residual profits as a bonus annually.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

I don't spend $$ at Amazon either.
But, I'm curious how John Mackey made out in the Amazon acquisition.
"Conscious Capitalism" seems likely oxymoronic in this story.
I shopped at clarkesville when I had the dime. Too many pre-yuppies at Whole foods in Austin in the early '80s for my blood. The mark-up at whole foods in San Francisco in the mid-90s were fucking insane. The marketing of good fresh food has been fucked up for a while, at least in some venues. And now amazon is taking it over? A good idea was fucked over years ago by capitalists and now it's a tool to undercut the few surviving local grocers. Great system eh?

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ggersh's picture

once a CEO forever a CEO no matter the performance

A good example of this is JP Morgan Chase's CEO Jamie Dimon, who recieved a 74% raise in the same year his bank paid $20 Billion in fines for illegal activities.

Now imagine a teacher getting rewarded for that performance, fired!!

Law and accountability no longer exist for WS/DC/NYC/SV.

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

@ggersh why, that's just totally fair, right? Sure it is, when a regular employee is lucky to see ANY raise, we can surely make the case that Jamie deserves that 74%. But we have NO problem with income inequality, nope, nothing to see here folks.

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

ggersh's picture

@lizzyh7 I see pitchforks in the future
that's a commodity we just don't see
enough of.

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

Lookout's picture

On Ralph Nader's radio show last week....
Ralph dissects how your boss makes 500 times more than you do with Steven Clifford, author of The CEO Pay Machine: How it Trashes America and How to Stop It. (first 20 min or so)
https://ralphnaderradiohour.com/outrageous-ceo-payprogressive-banksremem...

Good to see you out and about gjohn! Don't over do....get plenty of rest!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

enhydra lutris's picture

little or nothing other than maybe getting special favors from governments via cronyism and glad-handing.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --