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  • Pay Czar Feinberg Tells Newshour His Moves to Cap Pay Are Getting Results

    We posted earlier this week in advance of pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg 's release of his latest findings on executive compensation at companies that received TARP funds. Last night, Judy Woodruff interviewed Feinberg on PBS's Newshour , and asked him to share details about his latest efforts to cap pay, his process, and what effects he might be able to have from his self-describe "bully pulpit":

  • Lower Compensation for Top Execs at Bailed Out Companies Has Not Prompted Significant Departure Rate

    Kenneth Feinberg , the government appointed "special master for executive compensation," (often referred to as the Pay Czar), will approve the pay packages of the top 25 earners at companies that received more than one bailout from the government. New York Times reporter Eric Dash writes that average compensation for those executives is expected to drop 11% from last year. That is a significant drop, but compensation fell more last year. The average pay for the top earners is now $1.62 million, down "nearly 77 percent from 2008." And yet, the impact of this drop on executive retention is not so big, at least not yet. For months, Wall Street banks and the troubled automakers feverishly protested that their top executives would flee if they were not lavishly rewarded for their talents. New data, however, suggests the departures were more of a trickle than a flood. Of the 104 senior executives whose pay was set by the federal pay regulator in the last two years, 88 executives, or nearly 85 percent, are still with the companies even though their pay was drastically cut back, according to people briefed on the government data. The relative stability, at least within the executive suite, suggests that a soft job market, corporate loyalty and personal pride helped deter the feared management exodus at the companies hardest hit by the pay rules. Read Few Fled Companies Constrained by Pay Limits here .

  • Daniel Gross Finds Paulson, Investment Bankers Guilty of Looking Forward Without Looking Back

    Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson continues to make the rounds with his new book, On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System . Here he is telling Charlie Rose about how difficult it was for him emotionally when he knew that Lehman Brothers was going to collapse in September, 2008: Paulson is being candid and open about what he went through, as he does in much of the book. But Daniel Gross , in his review of the book at Slate , finds that Paulson comes up short when it comes to analyzing the responsibility some investment bankers had for the crisis based on their decisions in the early 2000s. One of those bankers was , of course, the CEO of Goldman Sachs--Henry Paulson: As the narrative lurches from crisis to crisis—TARP, AIG, GM—the reader, and Bush, are continually presented with bailout moves as unavoidable faits accomplis. Bush was "visibly shocked" when Paulson told him in November 2008 that Citigroup was in big trouble. "I thought the programs we put in place had stabilized the banks," the president said. The main problem with this fast-paced book was the main problem with Paulson's tenure—a surprising inability to see the big picture. And as tough as he is on congressional Republicans, Paulson lets some people off much too easy. If many smart, highly regarded people had simply carried out their responsibilities with a bit more diligence—Bernanke, EC Chairman Christopher Cox, Wall Street bankers—much of the catastrophe could have been avoided. "As first responders to an unprecedented crisis that threatened the destruction of the modern financial system, we had little choice," Paulson writes. But the first responders assembled the bonfire and helped light it. Paulson was among the Wall Street chief executives who, in 2004, lobbied the SEC to allow them to use much larger amounts of debt—a move that set the stage for the debacles of Bear Stearns and Lehman. Read Inside Job: What Henry Paulson's new memoir misses about his own responsibility for the global meltdown , here .

  • Average Annual Compensation, by US County

    The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released a new report on compensation by county. The figures are for 2008, and they show that American jobs paid, on average, $56,116 that year. That was up 2.6%. 80% of counties across the US saw average compensation per job rise. Total compensation was up 2.3%, and was outpaced by inflation, which rose 3.3%. The real value in this report is the county-by-county breakdown. Small counties--those with less than $1 billion in total compensation--saw a 3.1% rise in total compensation. Average annual compensation per job rose 3.7%. Of the 2,265 counties designated "small" by the BEA, Eureka County, NV has the highest average annual compensation at $91,585, and Petroleum County, MT has the lowest at $27, 285. 72.8% of all US counties fit the "small county" designation, and together they represent 8.3 % of total national compensation. Large counties, on the other hand, represent 5.4% of the total counties in the US, and 65.9% of total compensation. Among these counties, New York County (Manhattan) had the highest average annual compensation (and highest in the nation)--$117,509. El Paso County, TX, had an average annual compensation of $42,730. Read more from the Bureau of Economic Analysis here .

  • Dan Ariely on the Limits of Monetary Incentives

    Noted behavioral economist Dan Ariely asks, "If I gave you $10,000 to be funny in the next minute, could you do it?" It turns out that giving someone more money to do something can actually make it harder for them to accomplish the task at hand. In the first part of this BigThin k video, Ariely discusses research into whether offering workers more money produces better work:

  • Gen Y and Boomer Employees After More than Money

    It's not that Gen Y and Boomer employees don't care about how much they are paid, it's just that they want "a whole bunch of other stuff," and sometimes that "stuff" is even more important than the money. That is what Sylvia Ann Hewlett , Laura Sherbin , and Karen Sumberg found in researching the particular needs and desires of the two dominant generations (at least in terms of numbers) in the workforce. And as Hewlett, Sherbin, and Sumberg point out in the most recent Harvard Business Review , managers need to understand those needs and desires because they are driving workplace culture today: The combination of Generation Y eagerly advancing up the professional ranks and Baby Boomers often refusing to retire has, over the course of a few short years, dramatically shifted the composition of the workforce; each of these generations is roughly twice the size of Generation X, which lies between them. More important, Boomers and Gen Ys are together redefining what constitutes a great place to work. As we will show, they tend to share many attitudes and behaviors that set them apart from other generations. These shared preferences constitute a new center of gravity for human resources management. Here is Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy, discussing the findings in a Harvard Business Review interview: Read an abstract of How Gen Y and Boomers Will Reshape Your Agenda from the Harvard Business Review here .