Balzac's maxim that "behind every great fortune lies a great crime" may yet prove a fitting epitaph for American capitalism. A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal reveals that CEOs at major US financial and real estate firms converted tens of millions of dollars of overvalued stock into cash prior to the eruption of the current financial crisis, even as many of their corporations approached the precipice.
The Journal analyzed the fortunes of CEOs from 2003 to 2007 based on executive compensation and stock sale data. Fifteen of these CEOs took home more than $100 million in cash during this period. At the high end was Charles Schwab, who made over $816 million from his self-named accounting firm, almost all of it from stock sales.
Of the 120 publicly traded firms the Journal analyzed, CEOs cashed out a total of more than $21 billion. However, data was gathered only from publicly traded companies, and thus does not include similar fortunes that have been made by "hedge fund chiefs, Wall Street traders, and executives who sold their companies outright." Nor did it include data related to exit packages, the multimillion-dollar "golden parachutes" awarded to retiring or fired executives.
The Journal's findings underscore the parasitism and criminality of the US financial elite. Defenders have long justified extravagant CEO pay by claiming that these were the talented "risk-takers" who generated enormous wealth for investors. But the Journal's data shows that there is no correlation between compensation and a firm's success. On the contrary, many CEOs rewarded themselves just as their corporations approached ruin.
These included Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, who transformed his firm's stock into well over $100 million in cash. When added to his salary and bonuses, Fuld pocketed nearly $185 million in the five years before 2008, even as he guided his 150-year-old investment bank to ruin. James Cayne of Bear Stearns did nearly as well at his investment bank, collecting over $163.2 million, the vast majority of which was garnered from selling stock that would soon be scarcely worth the paper upon which it was printed.
Maurice Greenberg of American International Group (AIG) made $132.8 million between 2003 and 2005, when he was forced to resign. Well over $100 million of this came from windfall stock sales of the giant insurer. AIG collapsed in September, but was determined to be "too big to fail" by the federal government, and was bailed out twice in less than one month to the tune of some $120 billion.
In August, the sub-prime mortgage giant Countrywide Financial Group collapsed spectacularly, and was absorbed by Bank of America. In the previous five years, however, Countrywide's CEO, Angelo Mozilo, took home $471 million, over $400 million of which came from sales of the company's soon-to-be-worthless stock.
A look at the sectors of the economy where these richly remunerated executives worked, moreover, demonstrates the advanced rot of the US economy as a whole. Without exception, they represented corporations that engaged in financial speculation—"industries closely tied to the financial crisis," as the Journal puts it—and that produced no real value. These until recently "vibrant" parts of the economy functioned only to siphon off enormous social wealth and deposit it in the bank accounts of the CEOs and big investors.
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