Don't tie CEO pay to company stock

In my opinion, the current economic mess we're in is caused by company CEOs shifting their focus from putting out a good product to whoring themselves to investors.

Why?

To get the stock price up so they can exercise their quarterly stock options and increase their personal wealth and that of their cronies.

Unfortunately, this puts them in a catch-22 situation. To make the company attractive, they have to improve the "bottom line".

One of the more popular ways to do this is to lay off workers. This temporarily improves the balance sheet, but guess what? As more companies "improve the bottom line," the consumer base erodes. People don't spend when they are out of work. And so the vicious circle continues.

How to fix it? Perhaps CEOs' compensation packages should be divorced from the company stock. Maybe then American companies could go back to what they were so successful in doing in the past; making a superior product.

To do that, companies might put people back to work. The whole thing could fix itself.

I'm not an economic expert, but it seems to make sense.

Terry Tallinn

Wood Dale