Are we entering a new Guilded Age? The M&A boom has resulted in the explosion of merger-related payouts where CEOs get huge windfalls when there's a takeover.

This raises the obvious question of whether perverse incentives are in play. Are CEOs doing deals for their own benefit rather than for their shareholders?

It's a good question too with evidence suggesting that mergers have a failure rate as high as 80 percent . As BusinessWeek points out, these sorts of deals aren't golden parachutes. They are more like golden bungee cords that allow the CEO to bounce right back into the merged Entity with bigger rewards than ever before.

New figures show that executive pay is rising faster in America than it is in the rest of the world, with median total CEO compensation surging by 30.2 percent last year, compared with 15 percent in 2003. These numbers include pay rises for the bosses who failed! The big question is whether it points to a breakdown in corporate governance. Let's face it, the only way to stop this sort of stuff, or at least rein it in, is more pressure from shareholders.

A different picture across the Atlantic with the overall packages for FTSE100 executive directors falling on average by 7 percent because of the more stringent performance conditions on their long-term incentive plans.