The government is now asserting control over how much businesses can pay their executives by targeting not just companies that taxpayers have bailed out, but also companies that are merely regulated by the government. (And what companies aren’t?) From The Washington Post:
The Federal Reserve joined the Treasury Department on Thursday in imposing new limits on executive pay, extending the government’s control over compensation at taxpayer-owned companies to institutions that are merely government regulated.
The restrictions were the latest in more than a year’s worth of government intervention in matters once considered inviolable aspects of the country’s free-market economy and represent a signal moment in the history of the American economic experiment. After years of setting minimum wages, the government is now telling some companies how they should structure pay for those who run them.