Social Econ Blog

Kudos to some of America's corporate executives for taking advantage of 9/11 to line their pockets risk-free (from the WSJ):

On Sept. 21, 2001, rescuers dug through the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. Across town, families buried two firefighters found a week earlier. At Fort Drum, on the edge of New York's Adirondacks, soldiers readied for deployment halfway across the world. Boards of directors of scores of American companies were also busy that day. They handed out millions of bargain-priced stock options to their top executives.

...

A Wall Street Journal analysis shows how some companies rushed, amid the post-9/11 stock-market decline, to give executives especially valuable options. A review of Standard & Poor's ExecuComp data for 1,800 leading companies indicates that from Sept. 17, 2001, through the end of the month, 511 top executives at 186 of these companies got stock-option grants. The number who received grants was 2.6 times as many as in the same stretch of September in 2000, and more than twice as many as in the like period in any other year between 1999 and 2003.

Ninety-one companies that didn't regularly grant stock options in September did so in the first two weeks of trading after the terror attack. Their grants were concentrated around Sept. 21, when the market reached its post-attack low. They were worth about $325 million when granted, based on a standard method of valuing stock options."

I'd really like to know what these folks did to earn this money.

P.S. This seems like a reasonable time to highlight the new Saez-Piketty income inequality graph (Mark Thoma has more):