By Steve Hynd
Here's a graph that should make you angry. (Click for larger version.)
You wouldn't know it by his pay stubs, but Jiang Jianqing heads the world's largest bank.
Jiang, chairman of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, made just $234,700 in 2008. That's less than 2 percent of the $19.6 million awarded to Jamie Dimon, chief executive of the world's fourth-largest bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
The contrast illustrates the massive differences in pay among the CEOs of the world's top banks. The compensation of the CEOs of the largest U.S. banks towers above what's paid to banking chiefs in other parts of the world, according to a Reuters analysis of pay at the 18 biggest banks by market value.
..."The U.S. executive pay levels have always dwarfed pay for companies elsewhere in the world," said Sarah Anderson, a fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies, which is critical of Wall Street, and co-author of the recent study "America's Bailout Barons."
"They have claimed it is impossible to recruit people without paying such compensation. Yet, if you look at the pay levels in Europe and in a lot of Asian countries, somehow they manage to find people who can run major global firms while making a fraction of what they make in the U.S.," she said.
No-one deserves $19.6 million a year unless they've developed a universal cure for all illnesses or brought about world peace. Such massive compensation packages reflect the culture of "greed is good" which lies beneath the economic crisis. Remember these pay statistics while you read that the greedy banking industry is lobbying hard among our greedy political leadership to kill a proposed new agency that would be dedicated solely to protecting consumers' financial interests.
As my collegaue Dave likes to say, we should be sharpening our pitchforks.
To hell with pitchforks - I'm for light sabers and lasers. Actually the more I think about it a return to middle ages justice might be OK - drawing and quartering would be appropriate.
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