On February 5th, I commented on Obama’s plan to impose a $500,000 salary cap on U.S. executives who were holding onto taxpayer dollars for dear life.

Seven months later Obama has made bold moves in the right direction. Today the Treasury department ordered seven corporations, which have yet to repay their bailout money, to cut executive salaries and bonuses in half. The top 25 highest paid executives will have a $500,000 salary cap imposed on them and will see their perks capped at $25,000. The seven companies affected are: Bank of America Corp., American International Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., General Motors, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial.

The Federal Reserve also weighed in, suggesting the monitoring of pay packages at thousands of banks to ensure salaries do not continue spiraling out of control.

Although the salary situation hasn’t been as extreme among Canadian executives, there have been calls for Harper to adopt a similar policy. I’d like to see Harper follow suit and institute the same salary cap here. It’s a good idea, and it’s going to work.

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Tags: executive salary, obama, salary cap

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.