[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.23]&[12.24]

霁月难逢UID: 2718354

关于REBORN FROM THE ASHES组COMMENTS活动的说明&汇总
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1042733-1-2.html


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每次带组都要做的重头戏economist debate，大家认真做，对AW会有很多好处的

今天的这个比较多，算作两天的任务量
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Executive pay

This house believes that on the whole, senior executives are worth what they are paid


About this debate

Over the past few decades executive pay has risen dramatically. Bosses who were once paid ten times as much as shopfloor workers are now sometimes paid as much as 300 times as much. This trend was never popular, even during good times. But today it is becoming radioactive, as governments step in to rescue failing companies and ordinary people are forced to tighten their belts.

Is the anger justified? Some argue that executive pay is a long-standing disgrace. Pay is often not tethered to performance. Huge rewards for the few demotivate the rest of the workforce. Others are more sanguine. Successful executives, such as Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, can add hugely to a firm's profitability, benefiting workers, managers and shareholders alike. The growing pay of executives has to be balanced against the growing difficulty of their jobs, particularly as turnover in the boardroom increases.

Opening statements

Defending the motion

Steven N. Kaplan Neubauer Family Prof. of Entrepreneurship & Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely criticised for being overpaid.

Against the motion

Nell  Minow Editor and Co-founder, The Corporate Library

Excessive executive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess.

The moderator's opening remarks

Oct 20th 2009 |   Adrian  Wooldridge

Oneof the few things that anti-globalisation campaigners and stockmarketinvestors agree upon is that executive pay is out of control.
Itis not hard to understand this shared outrage: executive pay hasexploded since the 1980s. For most of the postwar era executives earneda few multiples of the median pay. But thereafter, starting in Americaand slowly spreading to the rest of the world, the multiples increasedexponentially. Today many American workers earn in a year what theirboss takes home in an evening.
Isn't this a disgrace? Critics ofexecutive pay worry that even mediocre bosses are given outsizedrewards. Robert Nardelli received a $20m pay-off when he left HomeDepot even though the share price had fallen during his six-yeartenure. Carly Fiorina was $180m better off when she leftHewlett-Packard despite a lacklustre tenure. Defenders of executive payargue that great bosses such as Louis Gerstner, the former boss of IBM,and Jack Welch, the former boss of General Electric, are worth everypenny because they create huge amounts of wealth for both shareholdersand employees.
The debate about executive pay, though never cool,is particularly hot at the moment. Workers have been squeezed by therecession. Unemployment is approaching 10% in the United States andmuch higher numbers in many other countries. Numerous governments areplanning to deal with their rising deficits by freezing public-sectorpay. And yet many bosses and bankers continue to make out likebandits—or so lots of people think.
We are lucky to have two ofthe best people in the business to debate this subject. Steven Kaplan,who proposes the motion, teaches at the University of Chicago's BoothSchool of Business. Nell Minow, who opposes it, is a long-timeshareholder activist and chairwoman of the Corporate Library, aresearch company. (For people who want to know more about her she isalso the subject of a profile in a recent issue of the New Yorker.)
MrKaplan starts off by making two fundamental points. CEO pay has notgone up in recent years; indeed, it has been dropping since 2000,particularly in relation to other well-paid groups, such as hedge fundmanagers, lawyers, consultants and professional athletes. Nor is CEOpay unrelated to performance. Boards are increasingly willing to fireCEOs for poor performance.
Ms Minow focuses heavily on therelationship between pay and the recent credit crunch. She points outthat executive pay helped to create the mess in the first place:Countrywide's CEO, Angelo Mozillo, made more than $550m during his timein office. She also points out that the fact that many companies thatwere bailed out by the government continue to pay their CEOs hugesalaries and bonuses is damaging the credibility of the system.
Suchbold opening statements raise questions galore. Is Mr Kaplan justifiedin starting his account in 2000 rather than 1980, when executive payexploded. And is Ms Minow right to concentrate so heavily on thefinancial sector? These are only a couple of the questions that we needto thrash out in the coming days.


The proposer's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 |   Steven N. Kaplan

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinelycriticised for being overpaid. Critics argue that boards do not respondto market forces, but, instead, are dominated by or are over-generousto their CEOs. Boards are criticised for not tying CEOs' pay toperformance. These criticisms have been exacerbated by the financialcrisis and the desire to find scapegoats.
I argue below that thecritics are wrong and that there are many misperceptions of CEO pay.While CEO pay practices are not perfect, they are driven by marketforces and performance. Contrary to public perception, CEO pay has notgone up in recent years. In fact, the average CEO pay (adjusted forinflation) has dropped since 2000, while the pay of other groups hasincreased substantially. Similarly, the view that CEOs are not paid forperformance is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true and boardsincreasingly fire them for poor performance. And, most recently,consistent with market forces driving pay, the US and UK governmentseach hired a new CEO (of AIG and the Royal Bank of Scotland) for payexceeding that of the median large company CEO.
It is useful tounderstand how CEO pay is measured. It includes three components:salary, bonus and stock-based pay. It is usually measured in two ways.The first is the sum of salary, bonus, restricted stock and theexpected value of stock options. I call this expected pay. Expected paymeasures what boards believe they awarded the CEO. This is the bestmeasure of what a CEO is paid each year. Note that the CEO does notactually walk away with this money. The second measure replacesexpected stock option values with values actually realized and realisedpay measures what CEOs walk away with.
The first graph shows average and median expected CEO pay forS&P 500 CEOs since 1994 (adjusted for inflation). It shows thatmedian CEO pay has been stable since 2001; it has not increased. Andaverage pay has declined substantially. In fact, average CEO pay in2008 is below the average in 1998.


Whileaverage CEO pay has declined, the pay of other highly paid groups hasincreased. The second graph shows S&P 500 CEO pay relative to theincome of the top 1% of US taxpayers. Relative to those other groups,CEOs are no better off in 2008 than in 1994. Strikingly, relative CEOpay is a half of what it was in 2001, a huge decline.


Whichare those groups that have earned increasingly high compensation? Hedgefund, private equity and venture capital investors have increased theirassets and fees substantially, translating into high pay. By oneestimate, the top three hedge fund managers earned more in 2007 thanall 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined. Professional athletes, investmentbankers, consultants and lawyers also have benefited greatly. Forexample, from 2004 to 2008, the inflation-adjusted pay of partners atthe top 20 law firms increased by 12% while that of S&P 500 CEOsdropped 12%. Those law firms had over 3,000 partners making an averageof $2.4m each.
One can look at the Obama administration for otherexamples. Larry Summers made $8m (more than the median S&P 500 CEO)giving speeches and working part-time for a hedge fund. Eric Holdermade $3.5m as a law partner.
So, while CEOs earn a lot, they arenot unique. The pay of people in the other groups has undoubtedly beendriven by market forces; all are compensated in arm's-length markets,not by cronies. Technology, globalisation and scale appear to haveincreased the market value of these groups. CEOs have not done betterand, by some measures, have done worse. Those who argue CEOs areoverpaid have to explain how CEOs can be overpaid and not subject tomarket forces, when the other groups are paid at least as well and aresubject to market forces.
Why is the pay of these other groupsrelevant for CEOs? Top executives regularly leave to work for privateequity firms and hedge funds. Law partners and consultants leave towork for public companies as general counsels and executives. Relativepay matters and all these groups are paid according to market demand.Markets are the driving force for senior executives in all theseindustries and talented people jump across industries, based on marketperceptions of their worth.
Critics also argue that CEO pay isnot tied to stock performance. Again, that is not true. Looking at whatCEOs actually receive—realised pay—Josh Rauh and I found that firmswith CEOs in the top decile of realised pay earned stock returns 90%above those of other firms in their industries over the previous fiveyears. Firms with CEOs in the bottom decile of realised payunderperformed by almost 40%. The typical CEO is paid for performance.
Thiswas reinforced in 2008, when average realised CEO pay declined by 25%(according to S&P's Execucomp). And Equilar, another provider ofCEO pay data, estimated that the typical CEO experienced a net worthdecline of over 40%.
The final myth to bust is that CEOs controltheir boards and earn high pay through this control and notperformance. In fact, CEO tenure has declined, from ten years in the1970s to six years today, and boards have got tougher on theirexecutives when they do not perform.
In sum, market forces governCEO compensation. CEOs are paid what they are worth. Talentedindividuals, who are perceived to be valuable, can move betweenindustries to be compensated well. The clearest example of this is thateven governments have to pay highly for talented executives. Recently,the Royal Bank of Scotland (under UK government control) hired a CEOwith a package worth up to $16m; AIG (under US government control)hired a CEO with a package worth up to $10.5m. For these critical jobs,both of these executives received compensation exceeding the pay of themedian S&P 500 CEO.


The opposition's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 | Nell  Minow

Excessiveexecutive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a causeof the current economic mess. And the post-meltdown awards are all butguaranteed to continue to create perverse incentives that will rewardmanagement and further damage the interests of shareholders and everyother participant in the economy.
Incentive compensation rewardedexecutives for the quantity of transactions rather than the quality oftransactions. It inevitably led to failures like the subprime disasterand the dominoes it toppled as it took the economy down with it. Worstof all, the avalanche of post-bailout bonuses and departure packageslike the $53m Ken Lewis got from Bank of America have severely damagedthe credibility of Wall Street and the American financial markets as awhole. The billions of dollars of losses do not come close to thereputational hit to American capitalism, which will increase the costof capital for all US companies.
Panglossian observers willalways be able to find some metric to justify any level of pay. But theresults speak for themselves. The decisions that led to the meltdownwere made by executives who knew that they would be paid tens, evenhundreds of millions of dollars no matter how successful theconsequences of those decisions.
Let us look at ground zero ofthe subprime mess, Countrywide, where Angelo Mozilo made more than$550m during his time as CEO. When the compensation committee tried toobject to his pay levels, he hired another compensation consultant,paid for by the shareholders, to push them into giving him more. Healso pushed for, and was given, shareholder subsidies, not just for hiswife's travel on the corporate jet but for the taxes on the imputedincome from that travel. Instead of telling Mr Mozilo that he had nobusiness asking the shareholders to subsidise his taxes, the boardmeekly signed off on it, making it clear to everyone in the executivesuite that the pay-performance link was not a priority.
By theend of 2007, when Countrywide finally revealed the losses it hadpreviously obscured, shareholders lost more than 78% of theirinvestment value. Meanwhile, in early 2007 Mr Mozilo sold over $127m inexercised stock options before July 24th 2007, when he announced a$388m write-down on profits. Before the bailout, Countrywide narrowlyavoided bankruptcy by taking out an emergency loan of $11 billion froma group of banks. Mr Mozilo continued to sell off shares, and by theend of 2007 he had sold an additional $30m in exercised stock options.There is the definition of outrageously excessive compensation.
Countrywideresponded to a shareholder proposal that year asking for a non-bindingadvisory vote on its pay plan by urging shareholders to oppose itbecause "Countrywide has been an outstanding performer" and because"The Board's Compensation Committee has access to the best informationon compensation practices and has a thorough process in place todetermine appropriate executive pay." They could hardly have doneworse. And it is likely that some market feedback on the structure ofthe pay plan could have given compensation committee members Harley W.Snyder (chair), Robert J. Donato, Michael E. Dougherty and Oscar P.Robertson worthwhile guidance.
Michelle Leder of theindispensable Footnoted.org website discovered that Frank A. Keating,Charles T. Maxwell and Frederick B. Whittemore, the compensationcommittee at Chesapeake Energy, not only paid the CEO, AubreyMcClendon, $100m, a 500% increase as the stock dropped 60% and theprofits went down 50%, they spent $4.6m of the shareholders' money tosponsor a basketball team of which Mr McClendon owns a 19% stake, theypurchased catering services from a restaurant which he owns just undera half of, and they took his collection of antique maps off his handsfor $12.1m of the shareholders' money, based on a valuation from theconsultant who advised Mr McClendon on assembling the collection. Theboard justified this by referring to Mr McClendon's having to sell morethan $1 billion worth of stock due to margin calls, his havingconcluded four important deals and the benefit to employee morale fromhaving the maps on display in the office. A market-based response wouldbe: (1) that was his risk and it is inappropriate to the point ofmisappropriation to force the other shareholders, already substantiallyout of pocket with their own losses due to his poor leadership of theorganisation, make up for his losses (2) if the deals are good ones, hewill be adequately rewarded when the benefit of those deals isreflected in the stock price; and (3) you have got to be kidding. Ifthis is pay for performance, what exactly is the performance we arepaying for?
These may be anecdotes, but they are illuminatingones. The numbers and details may be at the extreme, but the underlyingapproaches are representative. Even as outliers, they still demonstratethe failure of the system to ensure a vigorous, arm's-length system fordetermining pay and the inability of the system to require an effectiveincentive programme with a genuine downside as well as an upside.
Inmy comments, I will discuss the seven deadliest sins of executivecompensation, the two key elements that are essential for any plan thatmerits support from investors and the only metric that matters inlooking at pay.

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/402

splendidsunUID: 2723757

先占楼~恩~~
终于看完了~呼~~耽误了2天呀~
罪过~

This debate is relevant to a widely discussed topic that executives are overpaid. Firstly, the moderator opened the topic and presented the main points of the proposer and the defender. Then, the proposer and the defender stated their ideas subsequently. Actually, I think that the statement of one’s opinion for the first time is the same way with writing an issue. The presenter or the author establish his/her own viewpoint, and then use some relevant examples to illustrate his/her ideas. In this debate, the proposer concluded that the pay of CEO in recent years didn’t increase. Contrast to the other groups, such as professional athletes and hedge fund, the pay of CEO decrease as the financial crisis brought severe injury to the economy. The second point of the proposer is that the pay of CEOs had a high relationship with the performance of themselves. While, the defender thought that excessive executive compensation was both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess. In order to demonstrate his idea, the defender takes Michelle and McClendon as examples to show that the pay of CEOs is determined by the performance. This is the first round of the debate. Each side has valid reasons and examples. However, there are still some questions need to be clarified.

木虫虫UID: 2694986

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.23]&[12.24]

好词~
rise dramatically大幅度上升
shopfloor workers 车间里的工人
consistent with符合
walk away with 轻而易举的得到
Strikingly引人注目的
By one estimate 根据一项估计
substantially大幅的the pay has increased substantially
arm's-length 保持距离----crony密友
subject to 服从
inevitably不可避免的


专业词语的解释
hedge fund：http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AF%B9%E5%86%B2%E5%9F%BA%E9%87%91


好句~
But today it is becoming radioactive, as governments step in干涉 to rescue failing companies and ordinary people are forced to tighten their belts.(语言果然是相通的啊）

Is the anger justified?

Isn't this a disgrace?

Huge rewards for the few demotivate降低积极性 the rest of the workforce.

The growing pay of executives has to be balanced against权衡 the growing difficulty of their jobs, particularly as turnover in the boardroom increases.

These criticisms have been exacerbated加重 by the financial crisis and the desire to find scapegoats替罪羊.

Markets are the driving force for senior executives in all these industries and talented people jump across industries, based on market perceptions of their worth.

The final myth to bust is that CEOs control their boards and earn high pay through this control and not performance.

It inevitably led to failures like the subprime disaster次贷灾难 and the dominoes it toppled推倒了多米诺骨牌 as it took the economy down with it 这个比喻很生动哦

Theboard justified this by referring to归因于……

you have got to be kidding.

The numbers and details may be at the extreme, but the underlying根本的 approaches are representative.

In my comments, I will discuss the seven deadliest sins of executive compensation


理下思路：
The proposer's opening remarks

正方根据反方的论点，采取各个击破，并且在具体问题的论证过程中还组合了逻辑顺序，进行了有序的让步论证，方法如下：

①反方观点CEOs are routinely criticised for being overpaid.
→In fact, the average CEO pay (adjusted forinflation) has dropped since 2000, while the pay of other groups hasincreased substantially.

②反方观点Critics argue that boards do not respond to market forces.Boards are criticised for not tying CEOs' pay toperformance.
→In fact, the opposite is true and boardsincreasingly fire them for poor performance.

③展开详述Introduce how CEO pay is measured, to illuminate the arthor's contention more particular.
→The graph shows strikingly, relative CEO pay is a half of what it was in 2001, a huge decline.
首先大部分CEO没有拿很多的钱，不仅如此还比以前拿到的少了；
→Top executives regularly leave to work for privateequity firms and hedge funds. Law partners and consultants leave towork for public companies as general counsels and executives.其次，即使有人拿到比较多，那也是因为他在玩对冲基金或者其他风险投资，总之他们拿到的回报与他们的能力和付出是相称的
→The typical CEO is paid for performance. This was reinforced in 2008, when average realised CEO pay declined by 25%
不论如何，CEO的工资是根据他们的表现计算的。

④反方观点：CEOs control their boards and earn high pay through this control and notperformance.
→In fact, CEO tenure has declined, from ten years in the1970s to six years today, and boards have got tougher on their executives when they do not perform.(CEO也不容易啊，哪有那么大本事控制董事会啊，反过来是董事会对CEO很强硬)

In sum， market forces govern CEO compensation. CEOs are paid what they are worth.



The opposition's opening remarks
反方的方法主要是对问题进行层层分析和举出生动的事例。根据具体事情进行逐步反驳。
论点Excessiveexecutive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess.

①Incentive compensation rewarded executives for the quantity of transactions rather than the quality oftransactions.

②The decisions that led to the meltdown were made by executives who knew that they would be paid tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars no matter how successful the consequences of those decisions.

③The example of Angelo Mozilo , making it clear to everyone in the executive suite that the pay-performance link was not a priority.

④The story of AubreyMcClendon，the CEO of Chesapeake Energy

在事例的最后提出了反方的观点，与事实进行比较，使反驳更加有力：A market-based response would be: (1) that was his risk and it is inappropriate to the point of misappropriation to force the other shareholders, already substantially out of pocket with their own losses due to his poor leadership of the organisation, make up for his losses (2) if the deals are good ones, he will be adequately rewarded when the benefit of those deals is reflected in the stock price; and (3) If this is pay for performance, what exactly is the performance we are paying for?

Comment:

As the executives are overpaid for a long time, there goes the debate about executive pay; some arguers claim that the executive pay is often out of control. Others attempt to convince us that CEOs are paid what they are worth. In my opinion, both sides of the arguers have a logical exposition and compelling evidence. The reasoned structure of their debate makes the both assertions acceptable to me. As it is an expert article for me, I really can’t understand some theories in economics. I can not to definitude my view of weather the executives are overpaid. Absolutely, this debate enlarges my field of vision and provides me a lot of knowledge never touched before.

kulewy531UID: 2603031

Executive pay

This house believes that on the whole, senior executives are worth what they are paid

About this debate

Over the past few decades executive pay has risen dramatically. Bosses who were once paid ten times as much as shopfloor workers are now sometimes paid as much as 300 times as much. This trend was never popular, even during good times. But today it is becoming radioactive (Of or exhibiting radioactivity, booming), as governments step in to rescue failing companies and ordinary people are forced to tighten their belts.

Is the anger justified? Some argue that executive pay is a long-standing disgrace. Pay is often not tethered（To fasten or restrict with or as if with a tether） to performance. Huge rewards for the few demotivate the rest of the workforce. Others are more sanguine. Successful executives, such as Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, can add hugely to a firm's profitability, benefiting workers, managers and shareholders alike. The growing pay of executives has to be balanced against the growing difficulty of their jobs, particularly as turnover（The amount of business transacted during a given period of time） in the boardroom increases.

Opening statements

Defending the motion

Steven N. Kaplan Neubauer Family Prof. of Entrepreneurship & Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely criticised for being overpaid.

Against the motion

Nell  Minow Editor and Co-founder, The Corporate Library

Excessive executive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess.

The moderator's opening remarks

Oct 20th 2009 |   Adrian  Wooldridge

One of the few things that anti-globalisation campaigners and stock market investors agree upon is that executive pay is out of control.
It is not hard to understand this shared outrage: executive pay has exploded（grow radioactively） since the 1980s. For most of the postwar era executives earned a few multiples of the median pay. But thereafter（From a specified time onward; from then on）, starting in America and slowly spreading to the rest of the world, the multiples increased exponentially(成级数增长). Today many American workers earn in a year what their boss takes home in an evening.
Isn't this a disgrace? Critics of executive pay worry that even mediocre bosses are given outsized rewards. Robert Nardelli received a $20m pay-off when he left HomeDepot even though the share price had fallen during his six-yeartenure. Carly Fiorina was $180m better off when she leftHewlett-Packard despite a lackluster(无光彩的) tenure（occupation）
. Defenders of executive pay argue that great bosses such as Louis Gerstner, the former boss of IBM, and Jack Welch, the former boss of General Electric, are worth every penny because they create huge amounts of wealth for both shareholdersand employees.
The debate about executive pay, though never cool, is particularly hot at the moment.
Workers have been squeezed by the recession. Unemployment is approaching 10% in the United States and much higher numbers in many other countries. Numerous governments are planning to deal with their rising deficits by freezing public-sector pay. And yet many bosses and bankers continue to make out like bandits—or so lots of people think.
We are lucky to have two of the best people in the business to debate this subject. Steven Kaplan, who proposes the motion, teaches at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Nell Minow, who opposes it, is a long-time share holder activist and chairwoman of the Corporate Library, are search company. (For people who want to know more about her she is also the subject of a profile in a recent issue of the New Yorker.)
Mr. Kaplan starts off by making two fundamental points. CEO pay has not gone up in recent years; indeed, it has been dropping since 2000, particularly in relation to other well-paid groups, such as hedge fund managers, lawyers, consultants and professional athletes. Nor is CEO paid unrelated to performance. Boards are increasingly willing to fire CEOs for poor performance.
Ms Minow focuses heavily on the relationship between pay and the recent credit crunch (crisis). She points out that executive pay helped to create the mess in the first place: Countrywide's CEO, Angelo Mozillo, made more than $550m during his time in office. She also points out that the fact that many companies that were bailed out by the government continue to pay their CEOs huge salaries and bonuses is damaging the credibility of the system.
Such bold opening statements raise questions galore (In great numbers; in abundance). Is Mr. Kaplan justified in starting his account in 2000 rather than 1980, when executive pay exploded? And is Ms Minow right to concentrate so heavily on the financial sector? These are only a couple of the questions that we need to thrash out in the coming days.


The proposer's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 |   Steven N. Kaplan

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely criticised for being overpaid. Critics argue that boards do not respond to market forces, but, instead, are dominated by or are over-generous to their CEOs. Boards are criticised for not tying CEOs' pay to performance. These criticisms have been exacerbated by the financial crisis and the desire to find scapegoats.
I argue below that the critics are wrong and that there are many misperceptions of CEO pay. While CEO pay practices are not perfect, they are driven by market forces and performance. Contrary to public perception, CEO pay has not gone up in recent years. In fact, the average CEO pay (adjusted for inflation) has dropped since 2000, while the pay of other groups has increased substantially. Similarly, the view that CEOs are not paid for performance is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true and board sincreasingly fire them for poor performance. And, most recently,consistent with market forces driving pay, the US and UK governments each hired a new CEO (of AIG and the Royal Bank of Scotland) for pay exceeding that of the median large company CEO.
It is useful to understand how CEO pay is measured. It includes three components: salary, bonus and stock-based pay. It is usually measured in two ways. The first is the sum of salary, bonus, restricted stock and the expected value of stock options. I call this expected pay. Expected pay measures what boards believe they awarded the CEO. This is the best measure of what a CEO is paid each year. Note that the CEO does not actually walk away with this money. The second measure replaces expected stock option values with values actually realized and realized pay measures what CEOs walk away with.
The first graph shows average and median expected CEO pay for S&P 500 CEOs since 1994 (adjusted for inflation). It shows that median CEO pay has been stable since 2001; it has not increased. Andaverage pay has declined substantially. In fact, average CEO pay in2008 is below the average in 1998.


While average CEO pay has declined, the pay of other highly paid groups has increased. The second graph shows S&P 500 CEO pay relative to the income of the top 1% of US taxpayers. Relative to those other groups, CEOs are no better off in 2008 than in 1994. Strikingly, relative CEO pay is a half of what it was in 2001, a huge decline.


Which are those groups that have earned increasingly high compensation? Hedge fund, private equity and venture capital investors have increased their assets and fees substantially, translating into high pay. By one estimate, the top three hedge fund managers earned more in 2007 than all 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined. Professional athletes, investment bankers, consultants and lawyers also have benefited greatly. For example, from 2004 to 2008, the inflation-adjusted pay of partners at the top 20 law firms increased by 12% while that of S&P 500 CEOs dropped 12%. Those law firms had over 3,000 partners making an average of $2.4m each.
One can look at the Obama administration for other examples. Larry Summers made $8m (more than the median S&P 500 CEO) giving speeches and working part-time for a hedge fund. Eric Holder made $3.5m as a law partner.
So, while CEOs earn a lot, they are not unique. The pay of people in the other groups has undoubtedly been driven by market forces; all are compensated in arm's-length markets, not by cronies. Technology, globalisation and scale appear to have increased the market value of these groups. CEOs have not done better and, by some measures, have done worse. Those who argue CEOs are overpaid have to explain how CEOs can be overpaid and not subject to market forces, when the other groups are paid at least as well and are subject to market forces.
Why is the pay of these other groups relevant for CEOs? Top executives regularly leave to work for private equity firms and hedge funds. Law partners and consultants leave to work for public companies as general counsels and executives. Relative pay matters and all these groups are paid according to market demand. Markets are the driving force for senior executives in all these industries and talented people jump across industries, based on market perceptions of their worth.
Critics also argue that CEO pay is not tied to stock performance. Again, that is not true. Looking at what CEOs actually receive—realised pay—Josh Rauh and I found that firms with CEOs in the top decile of realised pay earned stock returns 90% above those of other firms in their industries over the previous five years. Firms with CEOs in the bottom decile of realised pay underperformed by almost 40%. The typical CEO is paid for performance.
This was reinforced in 2008, when average realised CEO pay declined by 25%(according to S&P's Exec comp). And Equilar, another provider of CEO pay data, estimated that the typical CEO experienced a net worth decline of over 40%.
The final myth to bust is that CEOs control their boards and earn high pay through this control and not performance. In fact, CEO tenure has declined, from ten years in the 1970s to six years today, and boards have got tougher on their executives when they do not perform.
In sum, market forces govern CEO compensation. CEOs are paid what they are worth. Talented individuals, who are perceived to be valuable, can move between industries to be compensated well. The clearest example of this is that even governments have to pay highly for talented executives. Recently, the Royal Bank of Scotland (under UK government control) hired a CEO with a package worth up to $16m; AIG (under US government control)hired a CEO with a package worth up to $10.5m. For these critical jobs, both of these executives received compensation exceeding the pay of the median S&P 500 CEO.


The opposition's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 | Nell  Minow

Excessive executive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess. And the post-meltdown awards are all but guaranteed to continue to create perverse incentives that will reward management and further damage the interests of shareholders and every other participant in the economy.
Incentive compensation rewarded executives for the quantity of transactions rather than the quality of transactions. It inevitably led to failures like the subprime disaster and the dominoes it toppled as it took the economy down with it. Worst of all, the avalanche of post-bailout bonuses and departure packages like the $53m Ken Lewis got from Bank of America have severely damaged the credibility of Wall Street and the American financial markets as a whole. The billions of dollars of losses do not come close to the reputational hit to American capitalism, which will increase the cost of capital for all US companies.
Panglossian（sanguine） observers will always be able to find some metric to justify any level of pay. But the results speak for themselves. The decisions that led to the melt down were made by executives who knew that they would be paid tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars no matter how successful the consequences of those decisions.
Let us look at ground zero of the subprime mess, Countrywide, where Angelo Mozilo made more than $550m during his time as CEO. When the compensation committee tried to object to his pay levels, he hired another compensation consultant, paid for by the shareholders, to push them into giving him more. Heal so pushed for, and was given, shareholder subsidies, not just for his wife's travel on the corporate jet but for the taxes on the imputed income from that travel. Instead of telling Mr. Mozilo that he had no business asking the shareholders to subsidies his taxes, the board meekly(温顺地)signed off on it, making it clear to everyone in the executive suite that the pay-performance link was not a priority.
By theend of 2007, when Countrywide finally revealed the losses it had previously obscured, shareholders lost more than 78% of their investment value. Meanwhile, in early 2007 Mr Mozilo sold over $127m in exercised stock options before July 24th 2007, when he announced a$388m write-down on profits. Before the bailout, Countrywide narrowly avoided bankruptcy by taking out an emergency loan of $11 billion from a group of banks. Mr Mozilo continued to sell off shares, and by the end of 2007 he had sold an additional $30m in exercised stock options. There is the definition of outrageously excessive compensation.
Countrywide responded to a shareholder proposal that year asking for a non-binding advisory vote on its pay plan by urging shareholders to oppose it because "Countrywide has been an outstanding performer" and because "The Board's Compensation Committee has access to the best information on compensation practices and has a thorough process in place to determine appropriate executive pay." They could hardly have done worse. And it is likely that some market feedback on the structure of the pay plan could have given compensation committee members Harley W.Snyder (chair), Robert J. Donato, Michael E. Dougherty and Oscar P.Robertson worthwhile guidance.
Michelle Leder of the indispensable Footnoted.org website discovered that Frank A. Keating, Charles T. Maxwell and Frederick B. Whittemore, the compensation committee at Chesapeake Energy, not only paid the CEO, Aubrey McClendon, $100m, a 500% increase as the stock dropped 60% and the profits went down 50%, they spent $4.6m of the shareholders' money to sponsor a basketball team of which Mr McClendon owns a 19% stake, they purchased catering services from a restaurant which he owns just undera half of, and they took his collection of antique maps off his hands for $12.1m of the shareholders' money, based on a valuation from the consultant who advised Mr McClendon on assembling the collection. The board justified this by referring to Mr McClendon's having to sell more than $1 billion worth of stock due to margin calls, his having concluded four important deals and the benefit to employee morale from having the maps on display in the office. A market-based response would-be: (1) that was his risk and it is inappropriate to the point of misappropriation to force the other shareholders, already substantially out of pocket with their own losses due to his poor leadership of the organisation, make up for his losses (2) if the deals are good ones, he will be adequately rewarded when the benefit of those deals is reflected in the stock price; and (3) you have got to be kidding. If this is pay for performance, what exactly is the performance we are paying for?
These may be anecdotes, but they are illuminating ones. The numbers and details may be at the extreme, but the underlying approaches are representative. Even as outliers, they still demonstrate the failure of the system to ensure a vigorous, arm's-length system fordetermining pay and the inability of the system to require an effective incentive programme with a genuine downside as well as an upside.
In my comments, I will discuss the seven deadliest sins of executive compensation, the two key elements that are essential for any plan that merits support from investors and the only metric that matters in looking at pay.

Comments:
The proposer’s remarks endeavor to defend for CEOs by three reasons. They start off claiming that CEOs’ salary is lower than other high-paid classes, such as lawyers and hedge fund managers. However, they failed to prove that these high-paid persons deserve what they receive. As a worldwide trend, the gap between the rich and the poor are becoming wider and wider. Secondly, the proposers tried to prove that CEOs are not assigned by crony, using the evidence that the tenure of CEOs is shorter than before, which is not closely related to the topic.
In the whole section, CEOs are only compared to other high-paid jobs and the former condition, but are not compared to those workers. This point is the main weakness.

rodgoodUID: 2619326

请问a vigorous, arm's-length system 是什么意思啊？ 谢谢

Useful words:

Disgrace耻辱,
tethered to与联系在一起,
sanguine乐观的，满怀希望的,
moderator调解者,
mediocre平庸的,
lackluster tenure碌碌无为的任期,
bandits强盗,
activist激进主义分子,
exacerbate使恶化,
cronies密友,
bust使爆裂、破产，逮捕,
subprime disaster次贷危机,
domino多米诺,
avalanche雪崩,
bailout跳伞，紧急救助,
metric度量标准,
impute归罪于，归咎于,
appropriation挪用,
outlier异常值，异常例子,
sin罪孽, misperceptions误解


Useful phrases and sentences:

walk away with 轻而易举的得到

subject to 服从


bail out保释，帮助摆脱困境,

thrash out研究解决,
start off开始,

meekly signed off懦弱地停止,
perverse incentives不正当的刺激,
has increased substantially,
consistent with
in the top decile
a vigorous, arm's-length system
particularly in relation to
tying CEOs' pay to performance
the only metric that matters in looking at pay

Such bold opening statements raise questions galore.

Contrary to public perception, CEO pay has not gone up in recent years.

Note that the CEO does not actually walk away with this money.

Those who argue CEOs are overpaid have to explain how CEOs can be overpaid and not subject to market forces, when the other groups are paid at least as well and are subject to market forces.

But the results speak for themselves.

They could hardly have done worse.

The numbers and details may be at the extreme, but the underlying approaches are representative.



My comments:

The debate is a great example to study and imitate for us to prepare for Issue Task.

The questions of whether executive pay has gone up dramatically and is forced by market or not are focuses of the debate.

The proposer denies the misperception of CEO pay directly at the beginning. In order to support the point that CEO pay has not rised without control, he firstly introduces two measures of CEO pay, which are called expected pay and realized pay. And expected pay is the best measure. Then he uses two graphs to prove that average expect pay of CEO has not increased since 2001 and CEO pay related to the income of the top 1% of taxpayers has declined in 2002, respectively. Then statistics and examples are employed to prove the combination of CEO pay and market force.

On the other side, the opposition offers several extreme examples to support her point of view. She suggests that it is incentive compensation in certain corporation that damaged the credibility of Wall Street and the American financial market. Examples of Countryside and Chesapeake Energy are also presented to argue that CEO pay is mostly depends on blindness of boards rather than market. At last, the opposition will discuss several deadliest sins of executive compensation.

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

GREAT! THIS IS WHAT I WAS DOING THE LAST WHOLE MONTH！！
PARLIAMENTIAL DEBATE!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Executive pay
This house believes that on the whole, senior executives are worth what they are paid
生词
读多遍才懂的句子
好句子，好表达法
================================================================================
About this debate

Over the past few decades executive pay has risen dramatically. Bosses who were once paid ten times as much as shopfloor workers are now sometimes paid as much as 300 times as much. This trend was never popular, even during good times. But today it is becoming radioactive, as governments step in to rescue failing companies and ordinary people are forced to tighten their belts.（popular和radioactive相呼应）

Is the anger justified? Some argue that executive pay is a long-standing disgrace. Pay is often not tethered to performance. Huge rewards for the few demotivate the rest of the workforce. Others are more sanguine. Successful executives, such as Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, can add hugely to a firm's profitability, benefiting workers, managers and shareholders alike. The growing pay of executives has to be balanced against the growing difficulty of their jobs, particularly as turnover in the boardroom increases.

Opening statements

Defending the motion

Steven N. Kaplan Neubauer Family Prof. of Entrepreneurship & Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely criticised for being overpaid.

Against the motion

Nell  Minow Editor and Co-founder, The Corporate Library

Excessive executive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess.

The moderator's opening remarks

Oct 20th 2009 |   Adrian  Wooldridge

Oneof the few things that anti-globalisation campaigners and stockmarket investors agree upon is that executive pay is out of control.
It is not hard to understand this shared outrage: executive pay hasexploded since the 1980s. For most of the postwar era executives earned a few multiples of the median pay. But there after, starting in America and slowly spreading to the rest of the world, the multiples increased exponentially. Today many American workers earn in a year what theirboss takes home in an evening.

Isn't this a disgrace?(连续两篇看到这个表达法！disgrace！) Critics of executive pay worry that even mediocre bosses are given outsized rewards. Robert Nardelli received a $20m pay-off when he left HomeDepot even though the share price had fallen during his six-year tenure. Carly Fiorina was $180m better off when she left Hewlett-Packard despite a lacklustre tenure. Defenders of executive payargue that great bosses such as Louis Gerstner, the former boss of IBM,and Jack Welch, the former boss of General Electric, are worth every penny because they create huge amounts of wealth for both shareholders and employees.

The debate about executive pay, though never cool, is particularly hot at the moment. Workers have been squeezed by there cession. Unemployment is approaching 10% in the United States and much higher numbers in many other countries. Numerous governments are planning to deal with their rising deficits by freezing public-sectorpay. And yet many bosses and bankers continue to make out like band its—or so lots of people think.

We are lucky to have two of the best people in the business to debate this subject. Steven Kaplan,who proposes the motion, teaches at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Nell Minow, who opposes it, is a long-time shareholder activist and chairwoman of the Corporate Library, a research company. (For people who want to know more about her she isalso the subject of a profile in a recent issue of the New Yorker.)
MrKaplan starts off by making two fundamental points. CEO pay has not gone up in recent years; indeed, it has been dropping since 2000,particularly in relation to other well-paid groups(“与。。。对比”的表达方式), such as hedge fund managers, lawyers, consultants and professional athletes. Nor is CEO pay unrelated to performance. Boards are increasingly willing to fire CEOs for poor performance.

Ms Minow focuses heavily on the relationship between pay and the recent credit crunch. She points out that executive pay helped to create the mess in the first place:Country wide's CEO, Angelo Mozillo, made more than $550m during his time in office. She also points out that the fact that many companies that were bailed out by the government continue to pay their CEOs huge salaries and bonuses is damaging the credibility of the system.
Such bold opening statements raise questions galore. Is Mr Kaplan justified in starting his account in 2000 rather than 1980, when executive pay exploded. And is Ms Minow right to concentrate so heavily on the financial sector? These are only a couple of the questions that we need to thrash out in the coming days.


The proposer's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 |   Steven N. Kaplan

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely criticised for being overpaid. Critics argue that boards do not respond to market forces, but, instead, are dominated by or are over-generous to their CEOs. Boards are criticised for not tying CEOs' pay to performance. These criticisms have been exacerbated by the financial crisis and the desire to find scapegoats.

I argue below that the critics are wrong and that there are many misperceptions of CEO pay.While CEO pay practices are not perfect, they are driven by market forces and performance. Contrary to public perception, CEO pay has notgone up in recent years. In fact, the average CEO pay (adjusted for inflation) has dropped since 2000, while the pay of other groups has increased substantially. Similarly, the view that CEOs are not paid for performance is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true and board sincreasingly fire them for poor performance. And, most recently,consistent with market forces driving pay, the US and UK governments each hired a new CEO (of AIG and the Royal Bank of Scotland) for pay exceeding that of the median large company CEO.
It is useful to understand how CEO pay is measured. It includes three components:salary, bonus and stock-based pay. It is usually measured in two ways.The first is the sum of salary, bonus, restricted stock and the expected value of stock options. I call this expected pay. Expected pay measures what boards believe they awarded the CEO. This is the best measure of what a CEO is paid each year. Note that the CEO does not actually walk away with this money. The second measure replaces expected stock option values with values actually realized and realised pay measures what CEOs walk away with.
The first graph shows average and median expected CEO pay forS&P 500 CEOs since 1994 (adjusted for inflation). It shows that median CEO pay has been stable since 2001; it has not increased. Andaverage pay has declined substantially. In fact, average CEO pay in2008 is below the average in 1998.


While average CEO pay has declined, the pay of other highly paid groups has increased. The second graph shows S&P 500 CEO pay relative to the income of the top 1% of US taxpayers. Relative to those other groups,CEOs are no better off in 2008 than in 1994. Strikingly(连接词用得好), relative CEOpay is a half of what it was in 2001, a huge decline.()


Which are those groups that have earned increasingly high compensation? Hedge fund, private equity and venture capital investors have increased their assets and fees substantially, translating into high pay. By one estimate(据估计的好说法), the top three hedge fund managers earned more in 2007 than all 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined. Professional athletes, investment bankers, consultants and lawyers also have benefited greatly. For example, from 2004 to 2008, the inflation-adjusted pay of partners at the top 20 law firms increased by 12% while that of S&P 500 CEOs dropped 12%. Those law firms had over 3,000 partners making an average of $2.4m each.

One can look at the Obama administration for other examples. Larry Summers made $8m (more than the median S&P 500 CEO)giving speeches and working part-time for a hedge fund. Eric Holdermade $3.5m as a law partner.

So, while CEOs earn a lot, they are not unique. The pay of people in the other groups has undoubtedly been driven by market forces; all are compensated in arm's-length markets,not by cronies. Technology, globalisation and scale appear to have increased the market value of these groups. CEOs have not done better and, by some measures, have done worse. Those who argue CEOs are overpaid have to explain how CEOs can be overpaid and not subject to market forces, when the other groups are paid at least as well and are subject to market forces.

Why is the pay of these other groups relevant for CEOs? Top executives regularly leave to work for private equity firms and hedge funds. Law partners and consultants leave to work for public companies as general counsels and executives. Relative pay matters and all these groups are paid according to market demand.Markets are the driving force for senior executives in all these industries and talented people jump across industries, based on market perceptions of their worth.

Critics also argue that CEO pay is not tied to stock performance. Again, that is not true. Looking at what CEOs actually receive—realised pay—Josh Rauh and I found that firms with CEOs in the top decile of realised pay earned stock returns 90% above those of other firms in their industries over the previous fiveyears. Firms with CEOs in the bottom decile of realised pay underperformed by almost 40%. The typical CEO is paid for performance.
This was reinforced in 2008, when average realised CEO pay declined by 25%(according to S&P's Execucomp). And Equilar, another provider of CEO pay data, estimated that the typical CEO experienced a net worth decline of over 40%.

The final myth to bust is that CEOs control their boards and earn high pay through this control and not performance. In fact, CEO tenure has declined, from ten years in the1970s to six years today, and boards have got tougher on their executives when they do not perform.

In sum, market forces govern CEO compensation.（简介，明了） CEOs are paid what they are worth. Talented individuals, who are perceived to be valuable, can move between industries to be compensated well. The clearest example of this is that even governments have to pay highly for talented executives. Recently,the Royal Bank of Scotland (under UK government control) hired a CEO with a package worth up to $16m; AIG (under US government control)hired a CEO with a package worth up to $10.5m. For these critical jobs,both of these executives received compensation exceeding the pay of the median S&P 500 CEO.


The opposition's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 | Nell  Minow

Excessive executive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess. And the post-meltdown awards are all but guaranteed to continue to create perverse incentives that will reward management and further damage the interests of shareholders and everyother participant in the economy.

Incentive compensation rewarded executives for the quantity of transactions rather than the quality of transactions. It inevitably led to failures like the subprime disaster and the dominoes it toppled as it took the economy down with it. Worst of all, the avalanche of post-bail out bonuses and departure packageslike the $53m Ken Lewis got from Bank of America have severely damaged the credibility of Wall Street and the American financial markets as awhole. The billions of dollars of losses do not come close to the reputational hit to American capitalism, which will increase the cos tof capital for all US companies.

Panglossian observers will always be able to find some metric to justify any level of pay. But the results speak for themselves. The decisions that led to the meltdown were made by executives who knew that they would be paid tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars no matter how successful the consequences of those decisions.

Let us look at ground zero of the subprime mess, Countrywide, where Angelo Mozilo made more than $550m during his time as CEO. When the compensation committee tried to object to his pay levels, he hired another compensation consultant,paid for by the shareholders, to push them into giving him more. He also pushed for, and was given, shareholder subsidies, not just for hiswife's travel on the corporate jet but for the taxes on the imputed income from that travel. Instead of telling Mr Mozilo that he had no business asking the shareholders to subsidise his taxes, the board meekly S&P 500 CEO signed off on it, making it clear to everyone in the executive suite that the pay-performance link was not a priority.

By the end of 2007, when Countrywide finally revealed the losses it had previously obscured, shareholders lost more than 78% of their investment value. Meanwhile, in early 2007 Mr Mozilo sold over $127m inexercised stock options before July 24th 2007, when he announced a $388m write-down on profits. Before the bailout, Countrywide narrowlyavoided bankruptcy by taking out an emergency loan of $11 billion froma group of banks. Mr Mozilo continued to sell off shares, and by the end of 2007 he had sold an additional $30m in exercised stock options.There is the definition of outrageously excessive compensation.

Countrywidere sponded to a shareholder proposal that year asking for a non-bindingadvisory vote on its pay plan by urging shareholders to oppose it because "Countrywide has been an outstanding performer" and because"The Board's Compensation Committee has access to the best information on compensation practices and has a thorough process in place to determine appropriate executive pay." They could hardly have done worse. And it is likely that some market feedback on the structure of the pay plan could have given compensation committee members Harley W.Snyder (chair), Robert J. Donato, Michael E. Dougherty and Oscar P.Robertson worthwhile guidance.

Michelle Leder of the indispensable Footnoted.org website discovered that Frank A. Keating,Charles T. Maxwell and Frederick B. Whittemore, the compensation committee at Chesapeake Energy, not only paid the CEO, AubreyMcClendon, $100m, a 500% increase as the stock dropped 60% and the profits went down 50%, they spent $4.6m of the shareholders' money to sponsor a basketball team of which Mr McClendon owns a 19% stake, they purchased catering services from a restaurant which he owns just under a half of, and they took his collection of antique maps off his hands for $12.1m of the shareholders' money, based on a valuation from the consultant who advised Mr McClendon on assembling the collection. The board justified this by referring to Mr McClendon's having to sell more than $1 billion worth of stock due to margin calls, his having concluded four important deals and the benefit to employee morale from having the maps on display in the office. A market-based response would be: (1) that was his risk and it is inappropriate to the point of misappropriation to force the other shareholders, already substantially out of pocket with their own losses due to his poor leadership of the organisation, make up for his losses (2) if the deals are good ones, he will be adequately rewarded when the benefit of those deals is reflected in the stock price; and (3) you have got to be kidding. If this is pay for performance, what exactly is the performance we are paying for?

These may be anecdotes, but they are illuminating ones. The numbers and details may be at the extreme, but the underlying approaches are representative. Even as outliers, they still demonstratethe failure of the system to ensure a vigorous, arm's-length system for determining pay and the inability of the system to require an effective incentive programme with a genuine downside as well as an upside.

In my comments, I will discuss the seven deadliest sins of executive compensation, the two key elements that are essential for any plan thatmerits support from investors and the only metric that matters in looking at pay.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
executive pay
shopfloor
disgrace
tethered
demotivate
sanguine
profitability
hasexploded
exponentially
tenure
deficits
public-sectorpay
activist
hedge fund
Nor
crunch
galore
thrash
exacerbated
scapegoats.
misperceptions
inflation
arm's-length
decile
tenure
perceived
perverse
incentives
transactions
inevitably
dominoes
Panglossian
metric
subsidise
meekly
outrageously
practices
catering
misappropriation
out of pocket
illuminating
outliers
sins
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
看完第一遍，觉得正反两方没有足够的正面反驳么·~ 貌似都是自己的观点说啊说·~~~
明天查完单词 然后再看一遍
再谢谢COMMENTS
今天睡觉啦·~

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment：

This is a quiet interesting topic among the ever provided passages. The executives, the focused group, are receiving more attention against the background of financial crisis. According to the author, there are two sides who are arguing about the issue that whether the executives’ payment is excessive or not. The group who propose the statement think the executives are worthy of their package, while the opposite group contend that they are not concerned about the consequence of their decisions. In my point of view, the pay-performance link is so obvious that it is unfair to ignore the data report which implies their wage decreased sharply due to the unprecedented economic mess. No one is capable of justifying the executives without referring to a thorough investigation. The best way to figure out the fact is probably to treat the executive as an ordinary profession like other occupations. Of course, their performance is not only determined by their own efforts, but also depends on the changing market. So if one really wants to evaluate the executives’ performance, he has to take the economic position into consideration as well. What’s more, the high risk is a central factor in measuring the cost effective. In sum, one needs to make a detailed investigation before he gets a fair and comprehensive outcome.

qisaimanUID: 2703629

the debate seems fresh to me, though the topic is an old one .
as far as I concern, whether overpaid exist is out of question, just looking at the difference of wage earned by the ceo and by a common skilled worker. but it can not be judged by angry workers who just lost job. if the pay is market-driven, it is reasonable.
as to the debate, either argument by the two participating the debate is sound enough .
one who proposing claim that realized-pay is decreasing since 2000 , especially compared to other well-paid groups. however, a dropping salary does not necessarily mean it is not too high. to tell how much is the exact normal is ridiculous too. the opposition's argument turned out to be an emotional and dull complain, which just reckon it poor persuasive. besides, a single guilt ceo can not be regarded as
a representative one of all.
the result is obvious when comparing the two. if there is someone to blame , it probably the market itself.

windandrain2004UID: 2597690

今天因为有乱七八糟的事情所以来晚了，先占楼

adammaksimUID: 2675466

disgrace
v.使丢脸
n.耻辱

mediocre
adj. of moderate or low quality, value, ability or performence

Robert Nardelli :
CEO of Chrysler

Carly Fiorina :an executive vice president at AT&T

continue to make out like bandits

galore
: abundant, plentiful


scapegoat:
替罪羊

consistent with： 与。。。一致

S&P ：
standard & poor’s

private equity ：In finance, private equity is an asset class consisting of equity securities in operating companies that are not publicly traded on a stock exchange.
私募基金

arm's length ：
the condition or fact that the parties to a transaction are independent and on an equal footing

crony：a close friend especially at long standing
cronyism : partiality to cronies

in the top decile
应该是前十吧

Talented individuals, who are perceived to be valuable




perverse adj. 刚愎自用的

subprime disaster
n. 次级债危机

dominoes n. 多米诺骨牌 topple the dominoes

panglossian adj. marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds

ground zero : the starting point for an activity

taxs on the inputed income: 所得税

meekly adv. 温顺地

write-down n. 账面资产贬值

outlier n.局外人

in my comments

at the extreme 有点极端

Summary and comments:
In Mr. Kaplan’s opening remark, he wanted to make us believe that criticisms about CEOs’ being overpaid are exacerbated. He bases his debate on two points. First, while CEOs earn a lot, they are not unique. And compared to other highly paid groups like hedge fund managers, consultants and lawyers, the money CEOs earn is not so much. Second, the boards are not controlled by CEOs; CEOs payment is driven by the market force. However, for Ms. Minow, the excessive executive compensation mostly contributes to the current economic mess.
In my comments, Mr. Kaplan’s debate is more persuasive and objective with the clear reasoning and detailed information. And Ms. Minow seems to pay too much attention to some extreme examples making her debate subjective and less cogency.Actually It’s hard to imagine the board will pay highly for a CEO who cannot bring profits to the shareholders in a market where everyone is eager to maximize their benefits. Moreover they often face a lot of pressure from their shareholders and boards driving them to live a high-paced life which is both a psychological and physiological heavy burden. As the value of a CEO is mainly determined by their former performance and experience, a CEO’s career is much like a politician’s, no mistake is permitted. Considering the cost and time it takes to become a successful CEO, to some extent, their highly payment is reasonable.

emteddybearUID: 2699606

sanguine:乐天的 demotivate：使消极  turnover ：营业额，成员调整，翻覆  outrage：愤怒 moderator：调解人 disgrace：耻辱 mediocre ：平庸的   share price ：股价 bandit：抢匪  credit crunch：信贷紧缩 bonus：分红 hedge fund managers:对冲基金经理 thrash   opening remarks：开场白 walk away with ：轻易拿走  arm's-length:保持距离  


提议：motion， remark


good sentence:
1.The debate about executive pay, though never cool,is particularly hot at the moment.
2.Such bold opening statements raise questions galore. 以后可以用，这句话
3.So, while CEOs earn a lot, they are not unique
4. Those who argue CEOs areoverpaid have to explain how CEOs can be overpaid and not subject to market forces, when the other groups are paid at least as well and aresubject to market forces.这是一个很好的辩论的句子

GREAT!!!!!
How good this articule is. If only I could write such kind of work! I hope before Mar. 2009 I can do it.

Untill now I have  finished the proposer's opening remarks.Go on tomorrow, and give some comments together.

敛寒影UID: 2613052

comment

This debate is very wonderful.The proposed side remark on specialficially that senior executives pays are worth what they are paid.There are two resons,one is that CEOs pays has decreased while the salary of other well-paid groups is increasing,considering the three components:salary,bonous and stock-based pay,and the other reason is that they earn high pay through their control and contribution rather than performance.Contrary to public perception,Mr Kaplan critic the argue public doubted one by one.After reading this part,I am firmly convinced that the CEOs are paid what they are worth,relavating to the performance,capability and responsibility.Ms Minow directly figure out unkown measures on forcing market with two representative example,and she argues that because of the phenominon exists,CEOs are overpaid.The two suitable cases Ms Minow refute the defending side is not strong,for they are considered typical in several efficient field not all of them.Compared with Mr Kaplan, Ms Minow did not prove his position further more.

In my appinion,I think the position of senior executives deserve more responsibility and working pressure,the ability they need to afford the position decides they earn high pay what they worth.

好的表达方式
Bosses who were once paid ten times as much as shopfloor workers are now sometimes paid as much as 300 times as much.倍数的表达
。。。 multiples of 几倍
But thereafter, starting in Americaand slowly spreading to the rest of the world, the multiples increasedexponentially.
The debate about executive pay, though never cool,is particularly hot at the moment.
。。。indeed,particularly in relation to...,such as....
focuse heavily on.......；concentrate so heavily on....
集中于。。。
bail out 帮助。。。摆脱困境
raise question galore 提出了丰富的问题
thrash out 力求解决
I argue below that thecritics are wrong and that there are many misperceptions of CEO pay.
contrary to public perception
Similarly, the view that CEOs are not paid forperformance is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true and boardsincreasingly fire them for poor performance.
appear to haveincreased the market value 提高市场份额
have not done betterand, by some measures, have done worse.
Those who argue CEOs areoverpaid have to explain how CEOs can be overpaid and not subject tomarket forces, when the other groups are paid at least as well and aresubject to market forces.这句话是很有针对性的批判
are all but guaranteed to continue to create....
It inevitably led to failures like......
severely demaged the credibility of ..... as a whole
do not come close to.....,which will increase
Instead of telling。。。，。。。signed off on.。。。，making it clear to everyone that。。。
Ifthis is pay for performance, what exactly is the performance we arepaying for?很有力的反击

demotivate 使士气低落
sanguine 乐观的
exponentially 指数地
mediocre 平庸的
tenure 职位的保有权
lack lustre tenure 低迷的任期
credit crunch 信贷紧缩
been exacerbated by 被恶化，被激怒
avalanche 纷至沓来
compensation committee 薪酬委员会

plukaUID: 2721764

NOTE

Is the anger justified? Some argue that executive pay is a long-standing（长期存在的） disgrace. Pay is often not tethered（束缚，栓系） to performance. Huge rewards for the few demotivate the rest of the workforce. Others are more sanguine（乐天的，满怀希望的，可以用来形容人啊）. Successful executives, such as Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, can add hugely to a firm's profitability, benefiting workers, managers and shareholders alike. The growing pay of executives has to be balanced against the growing difficulty of their jobs, particularly as turnover in the boardroom increases.一整段都很顺畅~

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely（例行公事地） criticised for being overpaid.

Excessive executive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess.

One of the few things that anti-globalisation campaigners and stock market investors agree upon is that executive pay is out of control. It is not hard to understand this shared outrage: executive pay has exploded since the 1980s. For most of the postwar era executives earned a few multiples of the median pay.

Critics of executive pay worry that even mediocre bosses are given outsized rewards.

Numerous governments are planning to deal with their rising deficits by freezing public-sector pay.

Such bold opening statements raise questions galore（adv丰富地）.

Boards are criticised for not tying CEOs' pay to performance.

The final myth to bust is that CEOs controltheir boards and earn high pay through this control and notperformance.

And the post-meltdown（彻底垮台后的） awards are all but guaranteed to continue to create perverse incentives that will reward management and further damage the interests of shareholders and everyother participant in the economy.

...making it clear to everyone in the executive suite that the pay-performance link was not a priority.

SUMMARY&COMMENTS

Here're two different(interestingly) styles of argument in my eyes. 

Start from Mr K, the proposer. He generally made two points, stating firstly that the truth about CEO's compensation was that it was lower, rather than higher, compared with the median payment for the majority and incomes in some booming industries such as hedgefund, private equity and venture capital investors; the second point was that payment of CEO's was actually tied to his/her performance and that unqualified executives would be fired by boards. To justify his argument, Mr K made some statistic comparison with histograms showing the relation of payments between CEO's and other groups, which well supported his contention that CEOs now were actually not better off but worse than before.He next explored the underlying reason for the ostensible rising compensation: the market force. Senior executives and talented people shifted swiftly across industries, seeking for better pay. Such competitive market drived companies, even governments, to offer high pension to keep capable personnel. Also he cited some recent issues illustrating this point. 

I appreciate Mr K's argument. It is clear and clean. Definite contentions, detailed figures and statistics, deeper explorations and relevant examples all together organized in a way that clarifes the main idea and the extensive structure.I feel rather comfortable and convinced when reading such an well-organized article. Excellent samples on argument writing~

Ms M's part, on the other hand, was saturated with compelling examples. She cited several notorious CEOs to prove that the post-meltdown compensation nurtured negative attitude of executives towards their jobs and that the board almost cosseted CEOs, allowing them to take advantage of their position in pursuit of personal gain. Those senior executives, as she pointed, got overpaid unreasonably and unmatched to their contributions. 

What upsets me a little is that Ms M's concentration on examples, though vigorous and compelling, is a little bit less clear than Mr K's. I'm the kind of person who want to see a clear-cut statement and then be convinced by materials author provided afterwards. The foregoing assertion help me reconstruct the line of argument. Ms M gave different examples one after another, yet for me the structure seems not as tangible as Mr K's. Meanwhile, Mr K dealt largely a holistic situation while Ms M lined up several specific cases. Emotionally I'm moved by vivid and specific recountal, but somehow another part of my mind keeps questioning the validity of such underlying generalization...

dingyi0311UID: 2627919

But today it is becoming radioactive（碰不得的，有害的）, as governments step in to rescue failing companies and ordinary people are forced to tighten their belts.
These may be anecdotes, but they are illuminating ones.
The pay of people in the other groups has undoubtedly been driven by market forces; all are compensated in arm's-length markets, not by cronies
t inevitably led to failures like the subprime disasterand the dominoes it toppled as it took the economy down with it.
CEOs are no better off in 2008 than in 1994
The debate about executive pay, though never cool,is particularly hot at the moment.
Contrary to public perception
The second measure replaces expected stock option values with values actually realized and realized pay measures what CEOs walk away with.
Suchbold opening statements raise questions galore
Unemployment is approaching 10% in the United States andmuch higher numbers in many other countries.
By the end of 2007, when Countrywide finally revealed the losses it had previously obscured,

restricted stock限制性股票指上市公司按照预先确定的条件授予激励对象一定数量的本公司股票，激励对象只有在工作年限或业绩目标符合股权激励计划规定条件的，才可出售限制性股票并从中获益
Compensation报酬
radioactive（碰不得的，有害的）
ground zero归零地，起点
demotivate打消积极性
scape goats.替罪羊
stock option 优先认股权
hedge fund manager对冲基金经理
credit crunch 信贷紧缩
bandit强盗
moderator 调解人


After having finished reading these debate the first impression in my mind is that the proposer’s opening mark is more objective and the opponent’s is more concrecte. Yet, none of argument form both sides are flawless.

As with Steven N. Kaplan’s argument, two main point was illustrated: (1) the CEOs are not over paid (2) what CEOs earned is firmly fixed with their performance. The proposor use two graphs to demonstrate his argument. One is the median and everage pay(adjusted with inflaction) of the S P 500 CEOs, another is about the shows S&P 500 CEO pay relative to the income of the top 1% of US taxpayers. This make us understand how much the CEOs actually earn.
However, comparing the earns of those CEOs with that of hedge bond manager, athlete, and consultants may not relevant. These jobs usually varies in the attribution and the responsibility. As to those athlete, they have no responsibility for the profit of the company, and what the company need them to do is to using them to improve the popularity among the public. The consultant’s are those providing the company with suggestions in a expert perspectives. Whether their advise was taken or not was depend on the CEOs and broad. And there are not many people invest in the hedge bond which is highly risky and yet highly lucrative.

On the other hand, the Nell Minow’s argument is not representative. All the argument is based on the example of the company Countrywide and its CEO Aubrey McClendon. But we don’t know the complex relationship between the compensation committees, Mr Aubrey McClendon, and the broad, and we have no idea wheather many of the companies have similar things that happened in the Countrywide. It is not that convincible to me.

Before the economic recession, why there are no much concern about the the salaries of the CEOs? The reason is that the media garner people’s attention on this issue. before the recession private investors are focus on the money they can make, less attention was paid on the CEOs earns. And people just know little about the salaries of the CEOs, they have no idea the exact number. The recession changed people’s focus, all the newspapers reports the high salaries of the CEOs and how their malpractice lead to people’s loses, which incur more hatred.

Moreover the government bail out policy helped to increase and spread the annoy among people.. the direct victim will be those people who invest in those companies, CEOs are robbing their money. After the government give those big companies money to save the economic. The direct victim become all tax payers in the country. This policy obviously will arouse more preversive anger. Beside the government involvement, the recession itself have make more people involve in this issue. many people lose their job or have to cut their salaries because of the economic recession. They are anger that those people who directly lead to this are still enjoy high salaries.

hugeseaUID: 190158

郁闷，出差了3天，
有3天的comments没有写，今天争取都补上，
这个先占个楼


comments

At the end of 2008, the financial crisis swept down the United States suddenly and overwhelmingly. Soon, it affected the other countries, and finally, it became a global financial crisis.

It has been said that that top executive compensation was a major cause of the financial crisis. This might not be true. Little transparency as it is, CEO pay is numerically minority in the market, and it is unfair to assume that it is one of the major causes. In fact, the financial crisis is merely a symptom of another, deeper crisis, which is a systemic crisis of capitalism itself.

Even if the burgeoning executive compensation is not the major cause of the financial crisis, Mr. Kaplan doesn't provide a very compelling argument. It is not enough merely to provide the developmentspeed data of top executive compensation with linkrelative method. Merely with such data, we cannot say that top executive compensation does not rise dramatically.