We’ve had a few things to say about Bear Stearns’s CEO James Cayne over the past few months. He also made it into the Finlay ON Governance Year End Awards. He was not a winner. Just earlier today, we suggested that standards were slipping so badly in America’s boardrooms that:
Maybe Jimmy Cayne’s sitting out a corporate crisis at Bear Stearns during a golf and bridge vacation last summer, and then doing whatever the Wall Street Journal reports he did involving a rather controversial tobacco substitute, will be seen as pretty innocuous.
Early this evening, we learned perhaps not so innocuous. Mr. Cayne will be leaving the top post. That’s a necessary move, but it’s still not a wise idea to have him (or any former CEO) retain his position as chairman of the board, which is Mr. Cayne’s plan. Maybe it will take a little while longer for Bear Stearns’s directors to learn that too.
You will read a lot about how Mr. Cayne was another victim of the subprime meltdown that has already claimed CEOs Charles O. Prince at Citigroup and Stanley O’Neal at Merrill Lynch. Such a conclusion would be inaccurate, in our view. Mr. Cayne was uniquely a victim of himself.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Cayne at Bear stearns is one more grossly over paid and incompetent and arrogant CEO.
His demise and that of Charles Prince and Stanley O’Neal is clearly not enough. Heads of the Boards of Directors must roll.
It is the lack of due dilligence of the Boards and the massive transfer of stakeholder wealth to executives the Boards and their friends which has corrupted management.
Where has the fiduaciary trust of loyal management employees gone….down the drain and into the gutter.
Individual stock holders, Pension funds and Insurance groups have to clean up this endemic mess by firing thousands of fat over paid executives……..compensation levels are obscene.
You must log in to post a comment.