I meant to write about this yesterday mainly because I knew most of the readers of this blog would want to know that their stock options they get at the companies they work for are worth a bit more or at least have the potential to earn a lot more money despite the crash in the markets.

   You say what? You don’t have stock options? You mean, you actually work for a living somewhere and you haven’t been showered with millions of stock options as part of your compensation? Wow, I’m shocked, shocked…

   Ok, so stock options have been a total scam. I won’t recount the long history of this scam but, in a nutshell, it was a game that was dressed up as "let’s give our big shot executives a big stake in the company so he will feel a real part of the company and work very hard to make it work"…when in fact, with the help of the boards of directors, stock options became just another way for the pigs to feed at the trough in a "heads I win, tails I win, and you, the shareholder, lose either way".

   A new example:

Composite Technology, which makes electric cables and other products, decided in January to lower the price at which its workers could use their stock options to buy shares in the company. The managers and directors slashed the price on all of the company’s 23.4 million options to 35 cents.

The move still leaves the company’s chief executive, Benton H. Wilcoxon, and others holding options that are underwater — meaning the price of exercising the options is above the current market price. But now Mr. Wilcoxon will be able to book a profit if the stock price increases by less than half, rather than quadrupling.

The repricing could be of particular benefit to Mr. Wilcoxon, who has a whopping 4.2 million options, previously priced at $1.13. The company lost $53 million in its latest fiscal year, and its stock fell to 27 cents on Thursday from as high as $1.36 last July.

Executives at dozens of public companies, including Starbucks, Google, Intel and smaller enterprises like Composite Technology, are taking steps to lower the prices that their employees would have to pay to convert options into stock.

   In fairness, the article says that some companies where stock options are also available to regular workers are not barring senior executives from taking part in this deal. But, count me as one who is skeptical that this is, broadly speaking, anything but another windfall for the executive class.