Randomly Noted

On Monday, Bank of New York Mellon CEO Robert Kelly pulled out of the running for Bank of America’s top job, with compensation the apparent sticking point: As a TARP-funded company under the thumb of the government, B of A couldn’t put together a compensation package worth Kelly’s while. I blogged that running a $2 trillion bank is not a public service.

Apparently, Ed Whitacre thinks running General Motors is a public service. The chairman and interim CEO is interested in finding a permanent chief executive for the erstwhile world’s biggest automaker, but guess what: he’s limited by the feds’ executive-pay constraints. So he makes the job sound like its holder would be doing the company - nay, the country – a favor.

“I think it would be somebodywho is wanting to do this for more than compensation,” Dow Jones Newswires reported Whitacre as saying. “It’s a big deal. It’s about coming back and making a company great and making it public again.”

Good heavens. Running GM is a thankless task, to be sure. Satisfying its government masters means pushing green vehicles absent evidence that consumers want to buy them. It means touting the electric-charged Chevy Volt as a savior even though it will cost $40,000 and is too expensive to make to be commercially viable. It means dealing with a still-bloated dealer network and trying to find buyers for the marques GM is finally trying to shed. And it means dealing with a UAW that still scarcely seems to understand the company is fighting for its life.

Would any renowned corporate executive take on this role as a way to give back to the U.S. after decades of personal success in the private sector? Not likely – with long odds against success, it’s not worth tarnishing one’s legacy. Would a successful CEO of another industrial company – earning millions as he or she leads the firm to billions in profits for shareholders - forsake competitive remuneration to work for comparative peanuts at a government-owned car company? To ask the question is to answer it.

If the government wants to attract top-flight talent to the companies under its charge, then it needs to scrap executive-compensation curbs. If you don’t pay the market rate for top-flight talent, you don’t get top-flight talent, making a return on your investment less likely. Is this the inevitable result when less than 10% of the solons of the Obama Administration have any experience working for the private sector?