US – Monday, March 15
National
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Movies
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Business
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My Pets
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Published 20:27, September the 23rd, 2008
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Wall St. executives pay price of failure

Crash destroys CEO stock values. Still, they won’t starve

 The financial crisis has taken a big bite out of Wall Street pay packets with top bankers losing hundreds of millions of dollars as share prices collapse.

The chief executives of Wall Street’s biggest banks get the lion’s share of their pay in stock and stock options.
Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers – forced into bankruptcy last week – lost more than $740 million as the Lehman share price fell from a 52-week high of $67.35 to almost nothing.

Fuld held 11 million Lehman shares, according to  the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, lost nearly half a billion to the credit crunch.

Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain saw his holdings lose more than $51 million while Morgan Stanley’s John Mack lost more than $123 million in value on paper.

David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s, the New York based credit rating agency, said: “Shareholders want to make sure that a chief executive runs the bank well and makes the share price go up. The easiest way to do that is to make sure his pay rises and falls depending on the success or failure of the company. Here we see what happens when the company fails.”

Still, Goldman's Blankfein had a total pay package worth more than $67 million last year.

Fuld, who received a bonus of more than $35 million in his last year, made so much as CEO that he is under pressure to return some of his fortune to shareholders who lost everything.