Bill Clinton's well-meaning 1993 campaign to tie executive pay to performance may have attracted risk-loving CEOs. Photo: World Economic Forum (flickr)

To poor countries, 2008's economic crisis must have seemed like a disease seeping from the wealthy global north. Two American thinkers have traced it to an unlikely source.

One early germ of the financial meltdown, which World Bank data show led to an unprecedented drop in foreign direct investment in the developing world and some of its slowest economic growth in a generation, may have come from a 1993 crusade against overpaid American executives, argues Daily columnist Reihan Salam.

Building on an argument by Nassim Taleb in the New York Times, Salam recalls a law championed by Bill Clinton as a way to slow rocketing executive compensation. The policy, Section 162(m), essentially capped executive salaries at publicly traded companies at $1 million annually by refusing to recognize larger salaries as a deductible business expense.

But there was an exception. Executive pay could be higher than $1 million if it were tied to performance.

Clinton's goal, reported in the New York Times in 1993, was to stop Wall Street executives from taking home "hefty amounts even when times are bad." But the effect, as shown on p. 65 of this report, was that executive compensation kept shooting up—it simply shifted from salaries to bonuses based on short-term corporate goals. This new compensation trend, in turn, helped drive out 1980s-style bankers who were "bland and predictable," as Taleb puts it, in favor of bankers who tended to be risk-loving gamblers.

Salam doesn't claim that Clinton's initiative was anything close to the only origin of the 2008 crisis. But he calls it a "cautionary example" of what can happen when you "layer new bad regulations on top of old bad regulations and call it progress."

Risk-loving gamblers, it turns out, may not be the best people to run massive corporations that can tank the global economy if they go down.

Chart by Carola Frydman and Raven E. Saks, from Historical Trends in Executive Compensation 1936-2005.

A revolutionary microbicidal gel can reduce a woman's chances of acquiring HIV by 54 percent. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps.

Funding was a huge topic of concern at this year's International AIDS Conference, which took place last week in Vienna. Scientists, survivors, activists and others striving to defeat HIV are worried because key donor nations have been cutting funding since the recession hit, says Reuters.

The trouble is, these cuts are coming at a critical moment in the fight against AIDS. Just this week, the New York Times reported on a new vaginal microbicidal gel that cuts women's chances of contracting HIV by 54 percent. The gel places a rare power in the hands of women, and one dose could be even cheaper than a condom. Moreover, earlier this month scientists reached a critical breakthrough in the search for an HIV vaccine. The Wall Street Journal described the discovery:

HIV research is undergoing a renaissance that could lead to new ways to develop vaccines against the AIDS virus and other viral diseases. In the latest development, U.S. government scientists say they have discovered three powerful antibodies, the strongest of which neutralizes 91 percent of HIV strains, more than any AIDS antibody yet discovered.

As developments like these bring scientists closer to an ever-elusive AIDS vaccine, their research needs funding now more than ever, reports the Washington Post. At the conference, Global Fund director Michel Kazatchkine told Reuters that his agency needs $20 billion over the next three years to carry this research forward. And in an interview with CNN, Bill Clinton warned donor nations that reduced funding now will mean more gruesome costs later.

If we all do this, the consequences will be calamitous and you'll spend more money later ... You'll start having large numbers of people dying again, you'll have more political instability, more economic collapse, and it's going to cost us more money later. So it's not only going to be a humanitarian crisis. You'll pay now or pay later. So if it's at all possible, hang in there.

HIV/AIDS programs have saved and prolonged the lives of millions, but at the moment 5 million more are still in need of drugs. As a result, activists like Desmond Tutu are looking to President Obama to renew his financial commitment to AIDS funding.