Jamie Dimon has floated the idea that he may consider leaving if his role is split. We noted that one analyst recently signaled a $20 billion or 10% risk that could come out of the stock if Dimon decided to leave the firm if his role is split. We have also warned of a coming activist investor bubble that seems to be forming as activist investors are attacking billions and billions worth of companies if you count the market caps.

Dimon has maintained that the issues behind the London Whale have been resolved. Unfortunately, many top lieutenants have left the firm in recent months. While this may be a sign that things were not as good as some analysts hope, this also has created a bit of a management vacuum and that leaves no heir apparent if Dimon chooses to just leave J.P. Morgan.

Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) has taken sides, saying Jamie Dimon is one of the greatest bank CEOs that exists. Ken Langone, a founder of Home Depot Inc. (NYSE: HD), also has been in full support and said that he would sell J.P. Morgan shares if Dimon leaves. Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) recently talked up its own split role position. The bank said that the split of a chairman and CEO role have worked well for it during the restructuring.

J.P. Morgan remains one of our top banks as one of the seven safest banks in America for 2013. Unfortunately, the London Whale issue and the loss of Jamie Dimon’s ability to speak against regulation and legislation has taken the bank’s leadership role away.

So, tell us what you think in our anonymous poll below.

CNN Money reports on Mayer’s first-year pay:

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took home a pay package of nearly $6 million for her first year on the job. In addition to a salary of close to half a million dollars, Mayer received a $1.1 million cash bonus and $4.3 million in stock, according to regulatory documents filed on Tuesday.

The Financial Times said on Mayer’s first six months:

Marissa Mayer was awarded total pay of $36.6 million for her first six months as chief executive of Yahoo, even as the internet company’s board made efforts to quell shareholder anger about excessive pay.

In a proxy filing before Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting in June, the California-based internet company said that it would tie remuneration more closely to executive and corporate performance.

Ms Mayer will be incentivized to prioritize revenue growth more than profits or cash flow, according to the filing.

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Zuckerber of Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) may not care about what his base pay is. His stock holdings in the social network are enough to make him a billionaire many times over.

Based on the Facebook proxy for 2012, Zuckerberg will have a base pay of $1. Since he has voting control of the company, which makes the board’s opinion on the matter academic, it is as well to say that Zuckerberg decided all he deserved, or needed, was a dollar. And the move many be an attainment for the disastrous IPO.

The proxy:

We entered into an amended and restated offer letter with Mr. Zuckerberg, our founder, Chairman, and CEO, in January 2012. This offer letter agreement has no specific term and constitutes at-will employment. Mr. Zuckerberg’s annual base salary as of December 31, 2012 was $500,000 and he was eligible to receive annual bonus compensation under our Bonus Plan. On January 1, 2013, Mr. Zuckerberg’s annual base salary was reduced to $1 and he will no longer receive annual bonus compensation under our Bonus Plan.

Last year, Zuckerberg made just under $2 million, and his chief assistant, COO Sheryl K. Sandberg, made $26.2 million.

As for Zuckerberg’s holdings, he owns 485,601,850 shares which is 66.5% of Class B shares and 53.7% of all voting shares. He also holds proxies that represent 67.2% of all voting shares when totaled with his.

24/7 Wall St. praises dividends. We also want to call out the myriad of great companies that need to realize that times demand investor payouts. A few companies are still buying growth, and we have identified some of these players as well. The thesis behind offering a solid dividend is that it instills confidence in investors that the company has earnings visibility for years even when the business cycle slows.

Having a real dividend policy may also be the key to keeping nervous investors from fleeing and going into cash or Treasury bonds, which pay almost nothing these days. There are just still too many companies in denial that they are still growth companies when they need to start directly rewarding shareholders. Some companies can get away without paying out a single cent to owners because the value of growth is so strong. That list is shrinking these days. Most companies we identified are in what we would call the “Dividend Sinners” category.

Our review focuses on Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. (NASDAQ: BBBY), Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A), Dollar General Corp. (NYSE: DG), Dollar Tree Inc. (NASDAQ: DLTR), eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY), Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA), EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Express Scripts Inc. (NASDAQ: ESRX), Jack in the Box Inc. (NASDAQ: JACK), Teradyne Inc. (NYSE: TER), United Continental Holdings Inc. (NYSE: UAL), Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Zebra Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ: ZBRA). We have handicapped whether investors might expect a dividend in the near-term or long-term from each of these as well.

The first order of business is to identify some of the great companies that have started paying a dividend since we (and others) have called for them to act with dividend payments in the past year or two. A few would include Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL), Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), Amgen Inc. (NASDAQ: AMGN), Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) and NASDAQ OMX Group Inc. (NASDAQ: NDAQ).

We expect that Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) likely will raise its dividend this week as well by roughly the same 7% or so as P&G. However, the real hikes we are excited about likely will be in Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) and Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX).

There is a reason that we expect solid dividend gains from Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) and Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX). While it is important that Exxon catches up to Chevron in yield, these companies have given internal raises. If they are raising pay internally, then they almost certainly will raise the payout for their common shareholders. After all, there has not exactly been a new floodgate opened in the past year as far as business conditions, and it is not as though oil went to $120 per barrel again.

Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) showed in proxy materials just last week that CEO Rex Tillerson received 15% higher compensation in 2012 than in 2011. That was put at $40.2 million. Keep in mind that Tillerson is nowhere close enough to being a founder here, even if he is considered to be a great chief executive. The fact is most of the increase was due to a pension value change and in deferred compensation, as his salary and bonus did not grow as much. All investors will read about is that his pay was up 15% or so, and they will want close to that, or more.

Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) is another story where higher pay for insiders should translate to higher pay for common shareholders. Chevron’s board of directors decided to raise their own pay by 25%, the first real raise since 2009. That director compensation will rise from $300,000 to $375,000. The board also lowered insider bonus ties to stock performance. CEO John Watson’s bonus was down by 13%, or about $520,000 to $3.5 million, while his salary was up $100,000 to about $1.8 million. We expect that shareholders will key off the director pay increase in their quest for higher dividends.

Due to Chevron already having a 3% yield and Exxon paying 2.6% in yield, we still expect that Exxon will want to raise its dividend by a higher percentage than Chevron. Both oil giants are not quite paying out 30% of their expected forward earnings, so they can increase dividends handily if they choose to do so and still have enough capital to deploy via share buybacks.

If you do not want just one source on why dividends are rising and by how much, S&P also gave a report on higher dividends continuing.

Hedge fund managers may be well paid, but the effects of poor performance can be extreme. It is not unusual for funds that have done poorly to lose a large portion of money they manage, even to the extent that funds can be forced to close. That is the ultimate “pay for performance” penalty.

The latest version of a study done by Institutional Investor was released recently. Authors of the “Rich List” reported that several managers returned 20% to 30% improvements in the value of their funds. These included David Tepper of Appaloosa Management, Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisers and David Loeb of Third Point. Managers who have had longer term success also made the list. These include Ray Dailo of Bridgewater Associates and Steven Cohen of embattled SAC Capital. None are strangers to lists of top hedge fund managers.

Extraordinary high pay nearly always brings out the historical comparisons with the compensation of teachers, fireman, police and blue-collar workers. In these professions, at least, workers are part of a huge infrastructure of support, paid for by the public or shareholders. While that does not lower the value of their contributions to society or private enterprise, it does partially explain why employees supported by massive investment in the systems in which they operate are paid modestly.

The pay level of teachers has to be measured in part by the fact that school buildings and books are paid for by the public, and that many of those investments have been in place for years. For blue-collar workers at large manufacturing companies, the facilities in which they work are usually the product of billions of dollars in factories and production line investments made by their employers, often long before these people take their jobs. In all cases, the level of risk to the job security of public and large corporation workers is fairly small.

In the debate over the pay of investment managers, a single factor explains some of what is considered “obscene” pay. Underperformers get put out of business.

The severance package for CEO Tim Horton was opposed by a federal bankruptcy trustee. AMR argued that the pay would be made after the reorganization and would consist of half cash and half stock in a new company formed from AMR’s merger with US Airways Group Inc. (NYSE: LCC).

The court rejected AMR’s argument because the company was asking to make the payment some six months before the merger occurs. The judge did say that if the merged company wants to make the payment after the merger is complete it may do do. This is the same judge who gave his approval to the merger between the two airlines.

As part of the merger with US Air, Horton will remain with the merged company as non-executive chairman of the board until next spring.

Gold recently was called a short-sell by the strategists at Goldman Sachs. We would ask how much the firm’s position in gold changed ahead of that call. Traders were even saying last week that something fishy was happening in the gold market. And now the exodus of investors and speculators moving out of SPDR Gold Shares (NYSEMKT: GLD) is acting to drive the price of gold lower too. As a reminder, we have said over and over that if the SPDR Gold Shares was a country it would be one of the world’s top holders of gold, as it has 1,181.4 tonnes and still has a value of $59.43 billion.

Silver is often called the devil’s metal, and some even call it the poor man’s gold trade. The iShares Silver Trust (NYSEMKT: SLV) has seen waves of selling too. Still, its assets are $9.3 billion. Silver usually follows gold trends, and sometimes on a very exaggerated basis. Hence the name the devil’s metal.

Back to Bitcoin. The run-up was driven in part by the woes of Europe, but apparently thousands of traders were opening trading and merchant accounts and this caused the system to not work. The top Bitcoin exchange, called Mt. Gox, halted trading after shares rose sharply and then came crashing down again. Remember one thing, we are talking about a virtual currency here that has no central bank. It is just a peer-to-peer network of buyers and sellers of a virtual currency.

If investors and speculators are willing to drive up a virtual currency, does this not offer validity to the real value of gold and silver? Sure, gold and silver cannot exactly be sent around cyberspace all over the planet anonymously. But the government cannot just print more gold and silver. What would stop more Bitcoin currency units from being created in the future if demand remains high?

If you have been around since the Internet first started to go mainstream (or before), then the notion of a virtual currency is nothing new. All efforts so far have flopped, with the exception of PayPal, under eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY). It already has been pondered that Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) could use its new virtual currency to rival Bitcoin. The long and short is that there are just zero barriers to entry here. Another issue is what happens when cyberthieves take a Bitcoin unit. How does one get back their anonymous currency?

The current craze reminds me of the lessons of DigiCash from the 1990s that was supposed to be an anonymous virtual currency. I actually wanted that effort to work, but it was ahead of its time and there were too many concerns and technical limitations keeping it from succeeding. Then there was eCash. Now there are at least a dozen offshoots. The world of micropayments was supposed to take off 10 years ago, and Peppercoin was supposed to be a leader there. Now that domain is an insurance website, and you hardly ever hear about micropayments now. So, what is the real long-term value of a buck, virtual or real? If history doesn’t somehow change, a buck is probably worth a buck.

Do not take this to be an implied defense of the price of gold or silver on a trading trend. Just look at gold and silver prices on Friday with gold breaking $1500 and over this past week. A rising dollar is at work here, and we have even seen a challenge to dollar-yen parity. This is serious business. If the dollar keeps rising, no defense of gold and commodities is needed because the currency markets are the largest markets in the world. They are so fast that they will dominate comments and defensive posturing of any jackass like me or others out there.

Who knows where gold and silver will settle. If the trend remains, the answer is simply “lower.” Still, if people are willing to bid up and bid down a virtual currency, what does it mean for the real value of hard assets that central banks and investors still want to hold as an alternative to overly printed paper currency down the road?

Someone once named silver  the devil’s metal and we love that name. The craze in Bitcoin is likely to end leaving the name for Bitcoin as ”the sucker’s currency.”

Imagine if Bitcoin does somehow get to make it and the value of a buck is no longer a buck. Someone will have to create a Bitcoin ETF that trades on a real stock exchange.

Last year, Xerox’s revenue fell 1% to $22.4 billion. Net income dropped 8% to $1.2 billion. Results for the fourth quarter were slightly worse. Revenue fell 1% to $5.9 billion. Net income was down 10% to $343 million.

The Xerox board offered its broad philosophy about how management should be paid, based on several “core principles.” According to the Xerox 10-K:

These principles are intended to motivate the named executive officers to improve the Company’s financial performance; to be personally accountable for the performance of the business units, divisions, or functions for which they are responsible; and to collectively make decisions about the Company’s business that will deliver value to shareholders over the long term.

How those principles could be applied to excuse the more than $13 million Burns made is beyond explanation or comprehension. Xerox’s financial “performance” was poor. The board has done nothing for shareholders with this package except sell them short.

Rich executive compensation has gotten a bad name over the years. The primary reason for the criticism is that CEOs are not paid for their performance. Rather, their packages are based on boards that favor the CEO’s benefits over those of shareholders.

Burn’s most recent sop to shareholders, as she described Xerox’s performance in the final quarter of 2012, was this:

“Strong growth in services and the consistent profitability of our document technology business generated significant operating cash flow and contributed to fourth-quarter earnings that met our expectations.”

Based on the company’s actual performance, those expectations are not acceptable, at least not for someone who is paid $13,070,245.

Mark Parker of Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE) was fourth at $35.2 million. He has warded off stiff competition from several other athlete gear and shoe companies, the first among them Adidas, which owns Reebok. Third on the list is Bob Iger, CEO of Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS), who made $37.1 million. He has kept Disney among the top multimedia companies in the world and has balanced the success of its television network (ABC), studios and theme parks.

And first on the list is Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL). He hardly needs the money and could work for $1, based on his extraordinary wealth. Forbes rates Ellison as the third richest man on the Forbes 400, with a net worth of $43 billion. Ellison made more than any other U.S. public company CEO in 2012 — $96.2 million. Ellison has kept Oracle in competition with other industry giants, which include International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and SAP A.G. (NYSE: SAP). And he has been more effective than most, making smart M&A decisions and integrating new companies into the parent.