Before instituting such invasive regulation, we should examine whether past compensation structures really were the catalysts for our recent problems. To say that they were implies three things: top bank executives were rewarded for short-term results with large amounts of up-front cash; bank executives did not hold sufficiently large amounts of stock to align their interests with those of shareholders; and executives with more short-term pay and less stock ownership should have had the greatest incentive to take bad and excessive risks, and thus should have performed worse in the crisis.