CEO greed another way to shift wealth

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.indystar.com/article/20081110/BUSINESS09/811100324/1109/BUSINESS09

Posted: November 10, 2008

Wealth is being redistributed. Governance appears ineffective.

No, this isn't leftover rhetoric from the presidential election. It's the oh-so-current situation in corporate America.
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The median total pay of Standard & Poor's 500 chief executives was $3.69 million in fiscal 2002, according to data from The Corporate Library, a corporate governance research company in Maine. By 2007, that median pay had risen to $9.24 million.

That's an increase of around 150 percent, amounting to a nifty $5.55 million pay increase for the CEOs of the nation's biggest companies. By the way, the S&P 500 index's annualized return over the past seven years is a modest 3.5 percent.

It's a vastly different story for ordinary Hoosiers. The median income of households in Indiana was $41,973 in 2002, according to the Census Bureau. In 2007, median household income in Indiana was $47,448. That's a 13 percent, or $5,475, increase.

How's that for a shift in wealth?

And it's not just big company CEOs who are doing well. S&P 500 CEOs led the way with a 22 percent pay increase from 2006 to 2007, according to The Corporate Library. But other CEOs didn't miss out on their raises: Total pay was up 15 percent for mid-cap CEOs and 5.5 percent for small-cap CEOs.

FULL story at link.

[MichiganVote]

1. They're all just living off the taxpayer and no one stops them. Just eating us all whole.

[JHB]

2. One thing he fails to mention is...

...this didn't start in 2002. This has been going on since Reagan.

[Beartracks]

3. Come on, that just "rewarding success"!

Although I suppose they might just be measuring success by the size of their own paychecks. :eyes: