George Akerlof Quotes

If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars. My salary was the same for 10 years. It was all performance-based.

Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.

My feeling about executive bonuses is that any candidate for a chief executive job who even raises the issue of bonuses should be dismissed out of hand.

Compensation needs to be predominately performance-driven. If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars.

I think most CEOs think their stock is undervalued, probably.

As long as perverse compensation systems for financial executives exist, the United States financial problems will remain nearly, if not completely, intractable.

The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

Executive pay has skyrocketed for many reasons - including the prevalence of overly cozy boards and changing cultural norms about pay - but increasing scale, competition, and innovation have all played major roles.

Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won't change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO's pay.

Many stock options in the corporate world have worked in exactly that fashion: they have gained in value simply because management retained earnings, not because it did well with the capital in its hands.

The relationship between executive CEO pay, stock performance is tenuous and not easily unscrambled, just one of myriad factors that affect the price of a stock.

American business would be run better today if there was more alignment between CEOs' interest and the company. For example, would the financial crisis of 2008 have occurred if the CEO of Lehman and Morgan Stanley and Goldman and Citibank had to take a very small percentage of every mortgage-backed security... or every loan they made?

Benefits are rarely made public in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, where companies must report the pay and options that their five highest-paid executives receive.

John W. Snow was paid more than $50 million in salary, bonus and stock in his nearly 12 years as chairman of the CSX Corporation, the railroad company. During that period, the company's profits fell, and its stock rose a bit more than half as much as that of the average big company.

By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption.

In general, investors prefer companies to reward executives for producing recurring income, not one-time gains.

A lot of deals are done or not done because chief executives are not fully aligned to shareholders.

Life at a public company ain't for me. The board pays you what you're worth, then you get reamed for your compensation.

I really believe that all CEO pay should be voted on by shareholders ahead of time. Mine was.

The details of the personal expenses that executives put on the company tab often are not known because loopholes in federal disclosure rules let publicly traded companies generally avoid disclosing the perks they give executives along with pay and stock options.

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term.

My obligation is to the owners of Barclays, my shareholders. They hired me. People who criticise compensation for individuals in isolation at, say, BarCap, individuals who don't work in the U.K. and are competing with U.S., German or Asian banks, they should look at all these factors.

The activists play the balance sheet by selling a division to buy back stock and leveraging the balance sheet and buying back more stock.

Tech executives have historically been owners of significant portions of their companies' stock so there is a propensity for them to diversify as a rule.

You can demonize Goldman Sachs all you want, and I'm sure there are reasons to do it. But the real pressure is all of us pressuring the companies for stock returns, and that leads to all kinds of decisions.