U.S. Cutting Pay for Bailed Out Company Executives

Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell

According to reports, executives from bailed out companies Citigroup, Bank of America, GM, Chrysler, GMAC, Chrysler Financial and AIG are going to see major pay cuts this year, which will be enforced by the president’s “pay czar,” Kenneth R. Feinberg. WaPo:

NEW YORK — The Obama administration plans to order companies that have received exceptionally large amounts of bailout money from the government to slash compensation for their highest-paid executives by about half on average, according to people familiar with the long-awaited decision.

The administration will also curtail many corporate perks, including the use of corporate jets for personal travel, chauffeured drivers and country club fee reimbursement, people familiar with the matter have said. Individual perks worth more than $25,000 have received particular scrutiny.

The American people have every right to be upset about generous compensation packages for executives at financial firms that are being kept alive by subsidies and bailouts.

But their ire should be directed at the bailouts, because that is the policy that redistributes money from the average taxpayer and puts it in the pockets of incompetent executives. Unfortunately, rather than deal with the underlying problems of bailouts and intervention, some politicians want to impose controls on salaries. This might be a tolerable second-best (or probably fifth-best) outcome if the compensation limits only applied to companies mooching off the taxpayers, but some politicians want to use the financial crisis as an excuse to regulate compensation at firms that do not have their snouts in the public trough.

This would be a big mistake. So long as rich people make money using non-coercive means, politicians should butt out. It should not matter whether we are talking about Tiger Woods, Brad Pitt, or a corporate CEO. The market should determine compensation, not political deal making. Markets don’t produce perfect outcomes, to be sure, but political intervention invariably produces terrible outcomes.

I debate this further on CNBC:

C/P The Hill

If You Like Fannie Mae, You’ll Love Auto Mac

Posted by Mark A. Calabria

While Bank of America and Citi grabbed most of the attention in the recently released bank “stress tests”  one of the biggest capital holes to be filled is that of GMAC, which under the stress test’s relatively light assumptions will need to raise another $11.5 billion in capital.

As one of the smaller of the stressed tested banks, and having almost no trading and counterparty risk — and hence little or no systemic risk, GMAC would hardly seem the candidate for any additional bailout funds.  Were GMAC to fold, our financial markets would hardly notice.  Who might notice is our auto manufacturers.

Just as easy credit inflated our housing market, it was easy credit — who can forget 0% financing — that lead the auto sales boom of the early 2000′s.  Just as many see Fannie and Freddie — along with help from the Federal Reserve — as leading us to a housing recovery, many also see GMAC as being at the heart of any recovery in the auto industry.

Given the state of the auto industry and the increasing level of defaults on auto loans, the safe bet is that GMAC will have a tough time rasing the needed $11.5 billion from non-governmental sources.

Once the government becomes a majority owner of GMAC, its only a matter of time until its focus shifts from re-bulding its financial health to expanding the American Dream of auto-ownership.