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Certainly, the run of greed-inspired scandals beginning in 2001 with Enron has brought about meaningful changes. The accounting industry now has a federally chartered oversight board. Stock analysts are no longer permitted to shill for investment bankers at road shows. Bankers at Goldman Sachs can't talk to analysts on the phone without a corporate chaperone listening in, and e-mails between their departments automatically bounce back. The compensation committees of public companies must now be composed of independent directors, reducing the chances for cronyism. There's legal basis for forcing executives to give back bonuses when accounting fraud...
Spitzer's view enjoys broad support among institutional shareholders. "Excessive executive pay undermines the very principles of free enterprise," says Phil Angelides, the California state treasurer and a board member of the California Public Employees' Retirement System. He endorses recent efforts to rein in those eye-popping stock-option grants but notes that CEOs still seem to find a way to get richer at their employer's expense. Grants of restricted stock have in some cases replaced the value of options for executives. Retirement benefits and deferred-compensation packages can also amount to millions of dollars and yet remain relatively...
...even got one), senior executives felt theirs. Median compensation for CEOs of companies in the S&P 500 rose 27% in 2003 on top of an 11.4% hike in 2002, according to the latest pay survey by the Corporate Library. Other surveys, which don't account for exercised stock options, found just single-digit increases in salary and bonus. And, yes, corporate profits rose sharply during 2003, up 18%. But that wasn't the case in 2002, and the gap between pay for the average worker and the typical large-company CEO has widened further. The typical CEO now makes...
Some companies are adopting more sophisticated formulas that peg CEO compensation to benchmarks other than the stock price in a bid to align pay more closely with performance. During each of the next three years, Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina can accrue up to 150% of a nearly $2 million cash award if she meets certain criteria for operating cash flow. But she will collect the full amount only if at the end of the three years HP stock has outperformed at least half the companies in the S&P 500. IBM is now granting its top 300 senior executives...
...N.Y.S.E., meanwhile, is reforming. The Big Board has split the positions of chairman and CEO, overhauled its board of directors and created the post of chief regulatory officer. In Washington the SEC is developing proposals that would tighten regulation of U.S. stock exchanges--the first order of business being that they must abide by the same disclosure rules they impose on publicly traded companies. But the changes afoot aren't enough for Spitzer. In a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review, he noted that "we have board compensation committees that are self-selected and interwoven. It's a rigged...