Executive pay is clearly out of touch with executive performance.
In the past 30 years or so, while real growth has been difficult to come by in mature markets, executive performance has become short-term transactional (i.e. through the buying and selling of businesses at inflated prices). These transactions have been executed in order to bolster a company’s share price in the short term. For a long time these transactional results seemed positive, and executive pay correspondingly grew. [...]