Underpaid and underappreciated?

To explain to non-banking types... if the Lakers offered Kobe 4 million per year, does he have the right to be offended? Hell fucking yes. Would any of us take 4 million in a heartbeat? There's not any doubt, but Kobe knows he's worth much more than that in terms of the success of his organization.

CEO of the largest bank in the world only making 6m? WHAT THE FUCK?

"Mr. Gulliver, whose unit trippled its pretax profit last year, is HSBC’s highest earner. His remuneration for 2009 amounted to about £10 million ($15 million), including a £9 million bonus, which he accepted."

HSBC's biggest dick only making 20m? how the fuck do those clowns retain their talent??

I personally do not really care if CEO's make a ton of money. I think people who concern themselves with how much others make and how "unfair" it is would be better served trying to improve their lot and how much THEY make.

Ben & Jerry's tried to be egalitarian with their CEO's pay. I believe they made it like 6x the average employee. They couldn't find anyone wanting to do the job. They had to raise the salary to 22x to finally find someone.

(This is about right, but off the top of my head. The numbers might be a little off, but you get where I am going with this)

A good CEO can really make a company great and ruin it if they are a crook. Unless all CEO's take a pay cut any firm paying below the going price will either get crappy CEO's or none at all.

HSBC is a ridiculous firm in any case. They massively underpay their non-executive staff, so they don't have an easy time retaining top talent.

I'm not sure why the HSBC execs are getting sizeable bonuses, though. They chose to be pussies during the financial crisis, and didn't make a move to expand their investment business through picking up Lehman's/Bear's/Merrill's assets. When MS nearly went under, people talked about HSBC as a possible buyer, but they made no move. Phibro was up for grabs at Citi, and they did nothing. And now, RBS Sempra is up for sale, and despite the fact that HSBC has no commodities business whatsoever (except their precious metals business), they're not even in the bidding process.

A few years ago, those same moronic execs were the ones behind HSBC's purchase of Household Finance, which was the sole cause of HSBC's financial woes during the crisis.

So...they're now patting themselves on the back for making bad calls prior to the recession and having no balls during the crisis? Seeing as they were one of the only solvent banking groups during the crisis (and would have been even better positioned without Household Finance weighing down the balance sheet), they should have taken the chance to massively expand their market share. Did they? No. They're pussies.

As such, I think the execs don't deserve much of a bonus at all.

So I guess, here's the question: if the ratio of CEO salary to lowest employee salary is roughly 344-to-1 in the U.S., as compared to 20-to-1 in Europe and 11-to-1 in Japan, what is it CEOs in the U.S. are doing that is so superior?

Many in the U.S. blame the economic crisis on gross executive overcompensation ... this may be true, but there's no doubt that many of the highest paid CEOs (throughout the world) are making THE tough decisions for companies which often have multi-billion bottom lines. If ANYTHING goes wrong, the CEO takes the fall. It's a lot of responsibility and deserves to be valued more highly than the company's janitor.

HOWEVER, can we trust the free market to properly determine fair CEO pay? Disclosure and publicity of pay may help us identify the egregious cases, and build pressure to fix them, but at the same time, most CEOs don't seem to care that their pay is astronomical AND public...

It seems we have to come up with some sort of non-arbitrary metrics that aren't sociopolitical, but in a backlash like this I'm not sure it's possible. Thoughts?

All company CEOs should be under scrutiny then. Hewlett Packard has add shit year after shit year, eliminated jobs just to keep the BSDs rich and look at how much their CEO made. In Banking a 6M CEO salary is laughable because of the commission (bonus) structure and overall earnings of the company. I bet the top 150 people at HSBC outearned the CEO.