Post 45. "I said executive compensation was too high. I haven't advocated that the government do anything about it. The stockholders are spread too thin to accomplish much unless there is a major stockholder that can get represented on the board, which is damn rare. Now the government is a stockholder in some of these baled out banks and they do have a say. But it doesn't work that way everywhere. I'd prefer that executive compensation be presented to the stockholders, NOT just the the boards, who are in on the take."
Fine, but I don't envision ANY situation where Government intervention in the financial markets would be a good thing.
what you describe as "worse" is the natural way the market regulates itself. you are ruining it, and punishing taxpayers for billions in the process. again, you leftys never cease to find problems you think the government needs to save us from, thereby ruining the way things would work and requiring more government help. ok got it. you are not for government intervention, you are merely stating your whims again. wait, what? so you are for it? you are speaking out both sides of your mouth, simultaneously denying you are for big government intervention and then describing exactly when you are in favor of it. like supafan said, you are foragainst it.
What is needed on exec comp. is not a cap. What is needed is a clawback. If the actions you took on your watch result in bankrupting the company within a year or two, you gotta give back 95% of what you made if the cause, as determined by a panel of 3 bankruptcy judges, was policies you executed. That would get most of the money back from the big wall st. investment back ceo's, and they should have it taken back. Without the clawback, we don't have pay for performance. We have "pay for the temporary illusion of performance", which can be achieved by using excessive leverage, or laying people off, or by starving R&D, or many other techniques that temporarily boost the stock price to allow a CEO to get rockstar rich while driving the company in the ground. With no check on "how" he makes the stock go up, and face it most of the mega comp packages are predominantly stock options and outright grants, the shareholders will be taken advantage of by the people they hired to run the company. This is a weakness of the corporate form of business organization, because while there theoretically are "owners", they are all absentee in the larger corporations. The CEOs pay lip service to the shareholders, but they know no shareholders have real insight to the day to day operations, and they can get by with pretty much anything they want (Enron, Worldcom, Lehman, Citigroup, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, need I go on...).
When the Fed sets interest rates at 1% and then strong arms the banks to give easy credit (guarantees) so every American can have a home doesn't leave them out of the dark. The banks played by the rules set before them and because of the Fed's dirty mixture the perfect storm brewed. Not only should those bad businesses failed but the FED should have went under as well. The only way a real correction or "stimulus" will occur is when you liquidate the bad debt.
the reason they can get by is because big government bails them out for billions with taxpayer dollars. without bailouts, companies run poorly would actually fail instead of being encouraged to be run poorly.
