The Homa Files

Excerpted from New York Times, “Need a Job? $17,000 an Hour. No Success Required”, by Nicholas D. Kristof, September 18, 2008

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Richard Fuld, the longtime chief of Lehman Brothers, took home nearly half-a-billion dollars in total compensation between 1993 and 2007.

Last year, Mr. Fuld earned about $45 million, according to the calculations of Equilar, an executive pay research company. That amounts to roughly $17,000 an hour to obliterate a firm.

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Three decades ago, C.E.O.’s typically earned 30 to 40 times the income of ordinary workers. Last year, C.E.O.’s of large public companies averaged 344 times the average pay of workers.

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These Brobdingnagian paychecks are partly the result of taxpayer subsidies. A study released a few weeks ago by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington* found five major elements in the tax code that encourage overpaying executives. These cost taxpayers more than $20 billion a year.

Edit by DAF

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Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/opinion/18kristof.html?ref=opinion

*IPS Report, “Executive Excess 2008: How Average Taxpayers Subsidize Runaway Pay”, 
 executiveexcess2008

IPS Site: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/

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This entry was posted on September 29, 2008 at 7:17 am and is filed under Compensation - Executive Pay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.