Lloyd Blankfein is the CEO of Goldman Sachs.  The company cut 900 jobs last year.  He earned $26 million in 2012.   Wouldn’t you be smiling? But he is not alone!

John Stumpf, the head of Wells Fargo Bank was awarded $19.3 million in 2012.

The Capital One chief, Richard Fairbank, was the third highest-paid bank CEO in North America even after taking a 8.9 percent pay cut, dropping his compensation to a mere $17.5 million for 2012.

Poor Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, saw his 2012 compensation cut in half to $11.5 million after a loss of more than $6.2 billion on a failed bet on derivatives.

The pay of the top 20 bank CEOs increased an average of 7.7 percent for 2012 compared with a year earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The tally is based on salaries, stock, bonuses and long-term incentive pay awarded to the CEOs for 2012.

The annual earnings of the heads of America’s largest corporations average is over $28 million.

Meanwhile the United States BLS reported last September that Median family household income declined by 1.7 percent in real terms between 2010 and 2011 to $62,273.

In other words the leaders of our largest companies earn more than 456 times the average family household earnings.

Isn’t free enterprise a wonderful thing?