The numbers are down but continue to be dreamland for most people. Forbes:
After a 15 percent collective pay cut in 2007, chief executives of the 500 biggest companies in the U.S. (as measured by a composite ranking of sales, profits, assets and market value) took another reduction in total compensation, 11 percent, for 2008. The last time the big bosses took a pay hit for two consecutive years was in 2001 and 2002.It's always nice to see the apologizers throw in nonsense statistics like this, as if it's so small, who could notice? It would be much more appropriate to reflect executive compensation with the average worker salary but this is always too embarrassingly high so they avoid it. As we are discovering during the recession, the overpaid executives are not nearly as valuable or perfect as they like to believe. To their credit, they sell themselves very well compared to what they deliver in the market.
In total, these 500 executives earned $5.7 billion in 2008, which averages out to $11.4 million apiece and computes to less than 1 percent of total revenues and 3 percent of total profits of their companies.
