Topic: Executive Compensation

"Without knowing why or how, we seem to have hatched our own oligarchs, and we stand aghast and bewildered at this flock of monstrous cuckoos," author Ferdinand Mount writes.

General Motors' CEO earned $7.7 million in cash and stock in 2011, the year the automaker reclaimed its global sales crown and boosted its annual profit by 62 percent.

Compensation of top executives at publicly traded companies rose by 14 percent on average in 2011, a sharp slowdown from the prior year.

Citigroup shareholders gave a vote of no confidence to the bank's executive compensation plan on Tuesday, dealing a surprise embarrassment to Chief Executive Vikram Pandit.

Blankfein’s $16.2 million pay package is likely to get attention both outside and inside Goldman Sachs, where thousands of staff members were fired last year due to weak performance.

Recession, Dodd-Frank rules, and criticism from their own shareholders may have slowed the growth of corporate pay in recent years, but according to initial reports on 2011 compensation, the chief executives of publicly traded companies are hardly going wanting.

Their advances may not always be welcomed by targeted companies, but activist investors share the same goal with management of generating value for shareholders. The differences between the two sides tend to lie in what strategy is used to achieve that goal. Sometimes those differences are ironed out behind closed doors, other times via proxy fights at shareholder meetings, but the clout of an activist investor is something corporate America can no longer afford to ignore.

The world’s richest chief executives have all either founded or built companies from modest beginnings, in many cases transforming their industries.  Their wealth is so large that it makes the earnings of the average CEO — with their stock options, pension plans and bonuses — look like pocket change. Find out who are the world’s wealthiest billionaire-CEOs.

The chief executives of GM, AIG, and Ally Financial had their 2012 compensation packages frozen for a second year in a row by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Financial firms continue to take flack for what many see as the outsized compensation they pay, but an early look at CEO pay for 2011 shows the biggest paychecks were doled out to the top executives at entertainment firms.

Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone chief executive, took home $213.5 million in pay and dividends in 2011, a third more than the year before and topping the scale for a select group of the founders of listed private equity companies, the Financial Times reports.

Huge pay packages such as retention deals and bonuses for incoming, current, and even exiting CEOs have critics calling corporate boards "tone deaf," USA Today reports.

Business levels are retuning to normal after four years of decline, a leading survey of financial services firms found on Monday, but there will be more job cuts in the City of London this quarter as uncertainty over the euro zone debt crisis continues.

Lloyds Banking Group said Antonio Horta-Osorio will return to the position of chief executive on Jan. 9 after independent medical advice said he had made a full recovery after being on sick leave from stress.

A global corporation is no less likely to make questionable executive hiring decisions as the average small business, and CEOs of major corporations have the short tenures on their resumes to prove it. Click ahead to see who some of these here-today-gone-tomorrow CEOs are.