Limiting executive pay: a pathway to reform (?)

James Surowiecki says yes:

if the bailed-out companies want to pay executives more than half a million dollars a year, they’ll have to pay them them in restricted stock, which means shares that the executives won’t be able to sell until the companies have paid the government back all of the money it invested, with interest. In other words, it’s only if a company performs well over an extended period of time that its executives will be able to collect what’ll amount to a bonus. Performing well for a quarter or even a year won’t do the trick: these executives will have to sustain that performance over time in order to cash out those shares. And this goes at least part way toward remedying what’s probably been the biggest problem on Wall Street, which is the fact that individuals have been able to make huge amounts of money while pursuing strategies that looked good in the short term but were terrible in the long term.

(Hat Tip: Guess Who.)