Stan O'Neal gets fired from Merrill Lynch: gets $161.5M parachute

I think I just figured out, quite by accident, how to underline every word in a post. I'll try to refrain from using this new-found power for evil purposes.

The first word in the above post should be "Using," not "sing."

It's not a question of enough pal. Its a zero sum game. Somebody wins and somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made....its simply transferred from one perception to anohter. Like magic.

$$$$$$ wrote:How much money do this Wall Street types NEED? Seriously, how much do you NEED to survive?

absurd, the guy destroyed (well, cost the company billions) the company and he leaves with $161M. this is no free market operation. this is a closed society with control over public investors's money, where A, B, C, D, and E vote to give F tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, while each of them sitting on various other boards, or being CEO's in their own right, do the same for others or are rewarded similarly, and these processes are not open and they are not closely scrutinized by the investors in the company. Nor do they bear any relationship to corporate profitability (in general). obscene by any measure, and yet restoring some progressivity to the tax rates is said to be some sort of communist move.

$$$$$$ wrote:

What sh*t.

$161,500,000. What do you do with $161,500,000?

Executive salaries are totally in another universe & completely unrelated to reality.

The killer is he's getting $161 million in severence for Screwing up! from the link:

The $2.24 billion loss was precipitated by a $7.9 billion third-quarter writedown, as the company revalued assets backed by shaky mortgages. O'Neal's ouster was expected after the loss.

If a guy was making shrewd decisions in order to make the company money I can see bonuses. I have a hard time believing that someone wasn't available to do the job for far less. There is no way his skill set is such that they need to pay a guy that much to do that job.

I could screw it up less and I'd do it for 1/10th the salary; in case the Merril board reads letsrun.

Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that some reactionary bottom- feeding tard-clown like "I Love Peeps" has not yet barnacled on to the fact that Mr. O'Neal is not Irish, but is, in fact, an African American gentleman. Have fun with that one, assholes.

Flat out incorrect? So he "earned" the money though severance pay. Who cares?!!! I think you missed the point.

The point is no man's labor is worth THAT MUCH regardless of what they do. Think how many people could live off of 161 million dollars in a year. Then think about how much of the money won't be spent to allow that to happen because it'll be cooped up in this jackass mother fu*ker's bank account!

SVC wrote:

Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that some reactionary bottom- feeding tard-clown like "I Love Peeps" has not yet barnacled on to the fact that Mr. O'Neal is not Irish, but is, in fact, an African American gentleman. Have fun with that one, assholes.

So you injected race into the discussion in order to criticize people who might inject race into the discussion?

I don't know whether O'Neal's compensation is any more outrageous than that of a number of other CEOs, such as Bob Nardelli, who was given $210 million as a severance package earlier this year when he was fired by Home Depot because he was an autocratic goon who seemed more interested in his own compensation than he was in enhancing general shareholder value. But I do believe that these people have not demonstrated their value in an open market for CEOs, and the directors of these companies have not made the case that these people are worth the money they are paid.

The first poster has no idea how US capitalism works.

How much Mr. O'Neal needs is hardly the issue. Needs is not a word they use on Wall Street. How much he negotiated is the only thing that matters. Its the only thing that matters to most professionals in this country.

Learning to negotiate is a very valuable thing.

Lesson: A Board of Directors, backed by shareholders, hires a CEO. A Board approves the termination and severance, negotiated long ago in an Employment Agreement. By law, the Agreement must be followed. Unfair or not, its the way it works.

Done. Good riddance Stanley.

Diversity at work. A great thing ha..

my retirement plan chugs ahead wrote:

A Board of Directors, backed by shareholders, hires a CEO.

"Backed by shareholders" is stretching things a bit.

Although I am on the side of those who believe that some of these compensation packages are outrageous, and probably contribute to certain unhealthy distortions in the economy, the social structure, and the political system, I'm not sure that they are all that easy to fix. Certain fixes seem obvious, like mandating the treatment of stock options as expenses under generally accepted accounting principles, so that shareholders can at least see more clearly how they are being screwed. Others seem a little dicier, like proposals to cap CEO pay at some muliple of the pay of lower-level workers. But eventually, directors and CEOs are going to give the middle finger to shareholders and the public at large in one too many cases, and there will be some regulatory reforms.

and tell me how is this any different from the thugs that you so idolize in the NBA that make this kind of money? get a grip, dude.