Entered into the database on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 @ 14:54:09 MST
"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.
The terrorist attack shut the U.S. stock market for days. When it reopened Sept. 17, stocks skidded more than 14% over five days, in the worst full week for the Dow Jones Industrial Average since Germany invaded France in May 1940. But for recipients of options, the lower their company's stock price when options are awarded the better, since the options grant a right to buy shares at that price for years to come. The grants set recipients up for millions of dollars in profit if the shares recovered.
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."
What makes this so pathetic is that corporate executives could have stepped up AND BOUGHT STOCKS IN THE OPEN MARKET if they believed they were so cheap. It would have been reassuring to a nation to see the leaders of industry voting with their own dollars. It might have made the subsequent economic slow down and period of tense aftermath less painful.>
Instead, these weasels decided to loot the treasury at the first opportunity. America was smouldering, the WTC lay in ruins, and this group of classless pigs decided it was time to pocket some cash.
The Cream of American Corporate "Patriots"
Graphic courtesy of WSJ
I'm going to take it a step further: These assclown executives are unAmerican. They are not Patriots, they are not model citizens -- they are merely a pathetic group of opportunistic whores who might as well hang outside the Holland Tunnel looking for a quick buck (although that would involve risk and work, something they have shown a distinct aversion to).
In 1929, when the stock market crashed, JP Morgan (and others) stepped in. They bought stock with their own dollars, they saved Wall Street. Oh, and they were rewarded for it -- both monetarily, and in the history books.
What the more recent group of execs did is probably legal. It certainly isn't ethical, and it reveals them to be "lacking in moral turpitude." I wonder if there's a morals clause in any of their employment contracts.
What a pathetic group of weasels. Brain cancer is too good for these shitheads. They -- and their lapdog Boards of Directors -- should all be fired.
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WSJ: After 9/11 as stocks sank, scores of US firms rushed to give millions in options to top execs
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After 9/11 as stocks sank, scores of US firms gave millions in options to top executives, reports the Wall Street Journal on the front page of Saturday's paper.
The paper asks, "Did companies take unseemly advantage of a national tragedy?"
"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," reports the Wall Street Journal.
One former stock-option-committee member for a Michigan firm defends the giveaways to the Wall Street Journal.
"If you believe the company is going to do well, and here is an external event that is affecting the market and you've made a decision to reward executives, you go ahead with it," John Lillard told the Wall Street Journal.
"Life goes on," Lillard added.
Excerpts from the article written by Charles Forelle, James Bandler and Mark Maremont:
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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.
The 91 companies included such corporate icons as Home Depot Inc., Black & Decker Corp. and UnitedHealth Group Inc. It included two companies directly touched by the tragedy. Merrill Lynch & Co., across the street from the Twin Towers, lost three employees. On Sept. 24, Merrill granted its president options to buy more than 750,000 shares, at a price 15% below the pre-attack level. At Teradyne Inc. in Boston, an employee delayed a business trip until Sept. 11 to attend a son's soccer game and died on American Flight 11. Teradyne that month gave its CEO more than 600,000 options at a price enabling him to buy stock at 24% below its pre-attack level.
There's nothing illegal about granting options after the market plunges. But acting so quickly after a national tragedy drove down stocks shows the eagerness of some companies to increase their executives' potential wealth. These grants also offer important new fodder for an already fractious debate over what constitutes the proper use of options in executive compensation.