> Muilenberg and McNerney “had personal reasons to emphasize productivity and cost-cutting” because their compensation was tied to share performance. Together they took $209 million in total pay over seven years.
Absolutely stunning - those guys will walk away from this mess with more money than God and American aviation will take a backwards step that may take decades to fix if at all... fuming here.
Incentives matter. The extremist solution would be to ban executive compensation tied to stock price and some mechanism where every penny more that goes into buybacks/dividends than R&D/CapEx is taxed at 105%.
Oh, and make executive and BoDs personally and criminally liable for safety fiascos like the 737MAX. I bet you'll see culture change in a hurry under those circumstances
"Some mechanism" is called simply taxation. In 1944, the top income tax bracket in the USA was 94 %. Nowadays you'd also need a wealth tax to deal with the perverse incentives caused by past accumulation of stock.
Stock buy-backs are a tax efficient way to send distribute to shareholders. If you make them illegal then the only way left to distribute money to shareholders is via dividends. Want to make that illegal as well???
Absolutely stunning - those guys will walk away from this mess with more money than God and American aviation will take a backwards step that may take decades to fix if at all... fuming here.