Of all the Cassandras and soothsayers on the dangers of executive compensation, you might list Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, perhaps, or corporate gadfly Nell Minow. But former NYSE chief Richard Grasso? The man whose $187 million pay package launched lawsuits and years of struggle with Eliot Spitzer?

Reuters

It makes a difference, perhaps, that the courts recently came out in support of Grasso collecting his money. And so there was Grasso, in a Bloomberg TV interview, lecturing on the dangers of opaque compensation:

"The primary source of discipline in executive compensation has and always will lie with the boards of public companies. You better be certain that your managers are compensated in a manner that the public understands. The public doesn't take issue if a company performs well and the stock performs well and the CEO is compensated very highly. The disconnect comes when the CEO is compensated very highly...and the stock declines."

Grasso's attitude was everything in its place: "[The Wall Street bonus structure] is clearly something that has to be looked at. You don't want traders and risk managers playing with the house money and in a position not to lose...if they are correct, their compensation goes up, and if they're incorrect, their entities suffer." He called for more stock in compensation, which would represent "a tying of interests between the individual, the company and the shareholder."