TalkingHead, what do you think actually determines your salary? -- Slightly different topic --P.S. On the CEO compensation issue, I'm in complete agreement it's outrageous. It's an obvious problem, and a small one in the grand scheme of things, but nonetheless it's still a problem.You know why it occurred? It wasn't always this way, as I'm sure Krugman will tell you in some op-ed. Used to be that the maximum salary of a CEO in America was about 25 to 50x the salary of the lowest paid employee. Today it is 250x that.The reason though, is interesting. It's because of the principal agent problem in economics. Mis-directed self interest. Basically the people who own companies publicly and privately are shareholders, and they are what has changed.Previously, the majority of shareholders at the start of the 20th century were individuals like you and I. Today, the majority of shareholders are institutions like pension funds, sovereign wealth funds etc. Now, they almost never exercise their voting rights to force down CEO pay. This is partly because they know the CEOs personally and they will get 'deals' in which the CEO sells out his or her own company if they STFU. Other times it is simply because of paperwork, there is simply too much of it to control all those companies directly and vote on everything. Too much to read! Some funds have tens of thousands of constituents, they can't know them all.So, essentially a lack of shareholder activism, a lack of individual shareholders is what has caused the problem. They can vote with their feet, but there are too few of them in the stock market for them to be noticed. If most investors were fundamental investors, or value investors, this problem wouldn't exist. Eventually it'll work itself out, it's doing that at the moment in fact. More institutional funds are taking more responsibility, trying to setup automatic voting networks etc. But it'll take a while for the system to adjust, perhaps a decade or two. True improvement in economies moves slowly, at a sure but snail like pace.On the other hand, large institutional funds are often reliable sources of capital for corporations that would be difficult to rally from millions of investors. So there's an upside and a downside.