In some high-profile instances, executives cashed in their stock options, while under their stewardship their companies lost millions of dollars and thousands of workers were laid off.
[examples needed] Golden handshakes may create perverse incentives for top executives to facilitate the sale of the company they are managing by artificially reducing its stock price.
The former top executive is then rewarded with a golden handshake for presiding over the firesale that can sometimes be in the hundreds of millions of dollars for one or two years of work.
Top executives often reap tremendous monetary benefits when a government owned or non-profit entity is sold to private hands.
Again, due to asymmetric information, policy makers and the general public see a government owned firm that was a financial 'disaster' – miraculously turned around by the private sector (and typically resold) within a few years.