'KNOW THYSELF"

Self-awareness is a good thing, especially if it helps fend off attacks on one's station in life. Reuters reports that an online poll at BNET showed that many executives also think they are overpaid:

Sixty-four percent of top executives view CEO compensation as excessive, according to survey released on Tuesday.

The poll of 1,572 readers of BNET.com, a business Web site, found that, overall, 77 percent of employees regarded CEOs as overpaid.

I'd argue that it's not just the CEOs but almost anyone involved in the securities market on Wall Street. Take Goldman Sachs, one of the world's largest firms. According to the AP:

Goldman spent $20.2 billion on compensation for the year, up 20 percent from last year. This means the 30,522 people employed at the company could have
received an average $661,400 each.

And how did they make so much money? Here's one answer from Bloomberg:

Joseph Mason, a former U.S. Treasury official and now a finance professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, says Wall Street had few takers for its subprime-tainted debt. ``When they couldn't sell it to more-sophisticated investors, they found less-sophisticated investors like local government investment pools,'' he says.