Executive Super-Compensation

This is an excellent article on executive compensation and growing income disparity. Click on the post title above to read the rest of the article.

Gilded age: how a corporate elite is leaving middle America behind

By Krishna Guha, Francesco Guerrera and Eoin Callan

Published: December 21 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 21 2006 02:00, Financial Times

Stephen Schwarzman, chief executive and co-founder of Blackstone Group, one of the world's largest and richest private equity firms, makes for an unlikely champion of the average American.

But minutes before chairing a meeting that will decide how to reward Blackstone's partners for its record profits this year, Mr Schwarzman, whose fortune Forbes has estimated at $2.5bn (£1.3bn, €1.9bn), says he is worried about the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth in the US.

"America is a place where people like to have the American dream, everybody successful," he says in an interview with the Financial Times. "The middle class in the United States hasn't done as well over the last 20 years as people at the high end and I think part of the compact in America is everybody has got to do better."

His concern is that the increasing publicity about the stellar rewards reaped by the relatively few in the financial and corporate world could trigger a political and social backlash....