Over the last couple of years, I've felt more out of sync with the world as we seem to return to the "greed is good days" of the 80s. The inept and corrupt always seem to be rewarded, or retire with their yacht and Caribbean Island, or even retain their posts in the resulting buy-out, and are able to walk away from the mess in many of these sorts of situation.

If you look at any cohort of people (school peers, university colleagues or even people in your street), the people in jobs that truly require skill or knowledge (the higher education sector is one I have personal experience of, but also look at the average salary of authors, amongst many other examples) don't seem to be doing as well compared to the people in the world of business and finance.

A friend that I met when we were doing our PhDs (easily the brightest of his year), struggled to secure a permanent job in academia and became an actuary. In his words it was a doddle, and he only intended to do it for a few years until he was sufficiently rewarded so he could leave and do something that actually interested him.

You might be amused by the following from Bill Bonner (editor of The Daily Reckoning) last April - the First, of course, but for one intoxicating moment one thought/hoped it might be true.

"This report from Bill Bonner yesterday:

A group of corporate executives, present and former - including Stan
O'Neal, Richard Fuld, Ray Irani, John Mack, Barry Diller and William
Foley - appeared at a press conference in New York. The spokesman for
the group startled reporters when he announced the group's intention to
return a considerable part of its earnings to the shareholders for whom
they worked.

"We've thought long and hard about this," said Mr. Fuld. "And we've come
to realize that these salaries are just absurdly high. None of us can
think of anything we've done anytime in the last ten years to warrant a
salary of even half of what we get paid - much less the $38 million Stan
got or the $322 million Ray got. Speaking for myself, I spent
practically all of last year attending meetings, parties, and ceremonies
- and frankly I can't recall what any of them was about. None of them
needed me. And I'll tell you something else, when I attend those board
meetings, half the time I don't even know what the accountants and
lawyers are [there] talking about. We got together this morning and
asked each other how those CDSs work, for example. None of us had any
idea. And apparently, believe it or not, between us, we've got billions
of them on our books."

As we've been saying here at The Daily Reckoning , executive salaries
are preposterous. But we never thought we'd see the day when executives
would admit it.