Wall Street: Time for a Raise

In Manhattan last week, the board of governors of the New York Stock Exchange signed G. (for George) Keith Funston, 51, to his third five-year hitch as president of the Big Board and raised his salary from $100,000 a year to $125,000. It was Funston’s first raise since he quit as president of Connecticut’s Trinity College to head the exchange in 1951, and it still left him relatively low in the pecking order of high-salaried Americans. (General Motors has nine executives earning more than $350,000.) Considering the general decline in stock prices in recent months, some Wall Streeters thought it an inappropriate time for the exchange president’s salary to go in the opposite direction. On the other hand, it could be argued that it’s a tougher way of making a living these days.