According to Nicholas D. Kristof, the C.E.O. of Lehman Brothers (you know, the financial institution that just tanked) earned a nice piece of change. Between 1993 and 2007, it was around half a billion dollars.
This brings us back to that approximate quote I put up from Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony. He said — this is not verbatim but close — "The thing that will eventually doom much of American business is that your executives pay no price for failure. You can become CEO of a corporation, do everything wrong, drive your company into the ground and then retire and buy several mansions with the money they will pay you for doing this."
It's one of those situations that will probably never change. It's like the wartime scams depicted in Catch 22: Everyone knew it was crooked but nobody stopped it because anyone in a position to stop it was making money off it.