CEO Pay drops but cash is king

This is a very long article. I only posted a little of it. You'll have to follow the link for the rest.

Here's a bit of good news for the Washington finger-waggers who think executive compensation has gotten out of hand: A survey of 81 big companies shows that CEO pay dropped by 8.6 percent last year. Now for the worrisome twist: The cash portion of their compensation rose 8.3 percent.

That's a sign that companies are de-emphasizing long-term incentives for their top guys, a particular bugaboo of Kenneth Feinberg, President Barack Obama's executive pay cop. Feinberg and many shareholder activists argue that CEOs should have a stake in the success or failure of their companies. The value of stock-option grants, that much-loved tool of incentive compensation, dropped 30 percent last year for the CEOs included in the analysis.

"To the extent there is more emphasis on cash than stock, that's unfortunate," says Feinberg in an interview about the survey. But, he adds, "every company is different. You can't across the board make any general evaluation."

For an early peek at how CEOs prospered — or didn't — Bloomberg BusinessWeek examined data from proxies filed by companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index by Mar. 12. To get an accurate comparison to the previous year's numbers, we included only CEOs who sat in the big chair in both 2008 and 2009. The data was compiled by Graef Crystal, a long-time compensation analyst.

Assuming the trend holds for the rest of the S&P companies, it appears CEO compensation may have fallen for the third year in a row. Executive pay peaked in 2000, when average total compensation hit $14.6 million for CEOs of S&P 500 companies, according to research by Carola Frydman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dirk Jenter of Stanford University. Their work shows that pay was roughly 40 percent off that high in 2008.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36054052/38627339