Fair question. That assumes one giant thing however. The CEO was concerned with the long term health if the company and wasn't simply "pumping and dumping" to cash in on golden parachute and stock options benefits.
Well, two things. 1) A company that enables a CEO to do that pretty much "has it coming" and 2) Compensation packages, and
especially options/severance benefits were vastly more modest for CEOs at the time most of these contracts were penned. The short version (in my view, and obviously vastly simplified) is that, while the sorts of contracts signed in the glory days of American Business were impossible to
keep up with in the later, less prosperous decades (and yes, it's certainly true that there was radically unsustainable growth in the 50s and 60s), it was emminently possible, even easy to meet the commitments entailed, otherwise they wouldn't have been made. What wound up happening, of course, is that 15 or 20 years later after the cupboard had been emptied be unscrupulous managers, the politicans they'd bought with the money they'd stolen were all too happy to accept the excuses that amounted to "Well, we
had to steal, we were hungry!" from dudes "earning" (even then!) 3 or 4
hundred times the salaries of their menial workers.
The notion that pension funds are just bound to fail is a blatant, ludicrous, deliberate lie cooked up by the people who steal them. The really funny part is when, in 5 or 10 years, the boom/bust cycle switches gears and they start peddling the same promises everyone for Christ's sake ought to know by now they have no intention of keeping. And people buy it. Again. It's like Charlie Brown and the Football, and it is astonishing.
