With the price of gold having fallen in the last year, the economics of many projects in the gold mining sector like Pascua-Lama don't really work. The costs associated with moving forward in Pascua-Lama were soaring while the price of the commodity was declining. Another way shareholders have been abused: the executives of many gold miners have been paid well even as their companies destroyed shareholder value. At Barrick, former CEO Aaron Regent was paid $12 million, mostly from a severance package after he was fired. The man who was hired to potentially replace Peter Munk at the top of Barrick, former president of Goldman Sachs John Thornton, got an $11.9 million signing bonus.