It's true that there are inevitable conflicts of interest regarding risk tolerance. This is especially true, for example, in hedge funds: the manager takes a 20

It's true that there are inevitable conflicts of interest regarding risk tolerance. This is especially true, for example, in hedge funds: the manager takes a 20% cut of the upside, but has no downside. Hence, there's an incentive for hedge funds to be risky. (Excluding a few top performers, hedge funds are not great investments.) However, I strongly disagree with this article. First of all, bubbles and crashes seem to be an inherent property of market economies. They've existed for at least four centuries (tulip bulb, anyone?) and possibly longer. Overreaching optimism seems to be an inherent human trait. Overpaid CEOs are a relatively new (few decades) phenomenon. The OP asks: Would you let someone fire and embarass you for a check for $20mm dollars ? So would CEOs. I'm not sure this is true. The CEO is going to be out of work for a few years, and possibly be unemployable at his current level in the future. Given that he already makes $10 million, a potential five-year setback is not worth that amount of severance. I agree that large company CEOs are overrated and overpaid, but I can't assign them all the blame for current economic problems, the sources of which are a lot more complex than the OP seems to think.