Here's Your Promotion, and Your Pay Cut

Get a big promotion and and a pay cut at the same time? It's not a textbook career path, but that's what happened to one newly minted chief executive: Mark Fetting, of the asset management firm Legg Mason.

The Baltimore-based company 's top execs show that Fetting wound up with less in his pocket after being promoted last January to replace Raymond "Chip" Mason, who stepped aside after many years at the firm he co-founded.

Fetting made a mere $4.7 million instead of $5 million, with the biggest hit to his bonus. It was $1.9 million compared to $3.2 million previously - based on a public filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the firm's 2008 fiscal year that closed at the end of March.

But if pay misery loves company, Fetting will be consoled by the plunge in other financial services bosses, including his own.

Mason's compensation package fell 40 percent from fiscal 2007 to fiscal 2008. He earned only $8.1 million compared to $13.6 million a year earlier. His bonus was only $2 million, a third of the $6 million bonus he was awarded in 2007.

It's still too early to register how the firm's first quarterly loss since it went public in 1983 will affect executive pay this year. In May, Legg Mason's assets under management fell 5 percent, to $950 billion, because of poor market performance and client withdrawals.

by Elizabeth Olson