Are Wall Street CEO's Worth The Money?

[lame54]

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/michael-lewis-talks-60-minutes-about (for video)

Michael Lewis on 60 Minutes

"Do they deserve all that money?" Kroft asked.

"Again, what do you mean do they deserve it? They worked really hard. They spent a lot of hours in the office," Lewis said. "So you can't begrudge someone who starts a company and employs lots of people and so on and so forth for making a lot of money. I don't mind people making a lot of money. On Wall Street the business has become very obviously divorced from productivity, from productive enterprise."

"So in that sense, no. They don't deserve it. They didn't earn it," he added. "What they did was finagle it. They were very good at putting themselves in the middle of large financial transactions that probably shouldn't have happened in the first place and taking out little pieces of it. They generated trillions of dollars of subprime mortgage loans that should never have been made. But the world would be better off if that whole industry had never existed. So that's crazy."