Paul Volcker, the former chair of the Federal Reserve and of a Wall Street investment bank, said not long before he died recently that “a kind of contagion [was] at work,” the profligacy symptomatic of a mass hysteria emanating from Wall Street. Do the CEOs of today’s top banks (or other financial institutions) really contribute five to ten times as much (in price-adjusted terms) to the success of their institution, or the economy, as their predecessors did forty or so years ago? I have my doubts. At least, it doesn’t show up in the economic growth rate, certainly not in the pay of the average
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