Maybe it’s me but at any level this appears to be very wrong!
The US Government put huge amounts of taxpayer’s money into the two huge US Mortgage companies Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation).
Now the BBC has reported that:
The heads of US mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may each receive pay packages of up to $6m (£3.7m) for 2009, depending on company performance.
Now I’m not an American nor do I really understand the issues BUT when taxpayers put in $111,000,000,000 of THEIR money into these organisations (that’s $365 for every man, woman and child on the US Census!) and so many of those same US taxpayers are up the proverbial financial creek without a paddle, there has to be a better way of rewarding top bosses (of US publicly owned corporations) than the option of $6,000,000 each!
But the regulator which decided the pay levels said the awards were 40% lower than before the government bailout.
The sums involved reflected the need to attract and retain talent, it argued.
Frankly, I just don’t believe that there aren’t many other incredibly capable business leaders who would do these jobs for a fraction of six million dollars. (The present incumbents are Michael Williams at Fannie Mae and Charles E. Haldeman Jr. at Freddie Mac who will receive a base of $900,000 in 2010 with the opportunity to earn $5.1 more if “certain targets are met“.)
Read the article here – I’m going to lay down in a dark, quiet room for a while!
By Paul Handover
Learning from Dogs 
Paul: The talent to steal is much esteemed by the plutocracy. That’s what they mean. They want to keep alive the myth that any of them is immensely worthy.
By comparison, no head of a French public or private for profit or not for profit company (and many are world’s giants) earn 6 million dollars.
But then their companies are worthy, which means that their work is its own reward, and that they are not good at stealing, and thus they deserve not as much personal profit…
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I am as big a critic of executive pay as anyone, so it’s hard to believe that I am about to say this, but the reality is that in America it would be very difficult to get anyone with the relevant experience to run organizations as big as Fannie & Freddie for less than $6 million. As a taxpayer, and thus shareholder, I don’t mind reasonable market pay, and (I know, this is crazy), $6 million is reasonable, especially when $5 million of it is variable based on targets. If the number were $20 million, that would be way out of line, but $6 million seems OK. Clearly I have developed some sort of immunity to outrage.
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Well I have no way of knowing whether you are right or not but, of course, respect your opinion.
I would love to know, however, if amongst the many competent executives who have lost their jobs there is one who would step up to the mark.
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