Bank CEOs Earn Big Bucks Even as Stocks Get Slammed

Published: Friday, 30 Dec 2011 | 11:06 AM ET Text Size
By: Jeff Cox
CNBC.com Senior Writer

Banks may have gotten hammered this year in the stock market, but the CEOs who run them are doing just fine.

While the nation's biggest financial institutions saw their market capitalization drop by an average of 11.1 percent, bank CEO compensation averaged $7.74 million, according to calculations by Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove.

That means the banking heads earned 50 to 100 times the average worker and did much better than their shareholders, who saw bank stocks as a group plunge about 26 percent this year.

Take JPMorgan Chase [JPM 33.2144 -0.2056 (-0.62%) ]. The Wall Street titan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, will earn just shy of $42 million this year for a bank that lost nearly a quarter of its market cap—or 23 percent—during the year, according to Bove's numbers. more...