We may never hear of several million dollars worth of bonuses again, but most of these people will always be handsomely compensated beyond the dreams of bourgeois fantasies. Getting angry about that is, in my opinion, is a lot like getting angry that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. I'm more interested in remedies than in casting blame. -- Assezmalicieuse

A number of the people posting negatively here may think Kanye West, Kobe Bryant or Adam Sandler (to use three extreme examples) are worth every penny they make. However, if any one of them were caught rodgering a goat while wearing clown make-up and a fright wig in front of a group of kindergardeners, you'd hear and read a lot of the same "fuck them" vitriol.

You're correct that a lot of the better money managers will land or have already landed on their feet and will continue to be compensated handsomely for their "services." But that's not really the point, and John Thain, for example, is not really one of these people. He's an arrogant bastard (like the previous president) and not a "master of the universe."

And while the "industry" perhaps needed a shake-out, tell that to the poor schmuck in settlements making $55K a year who had nothing to do with bundling shitty mortgages with bogus AAA ratings. There are thousands of these people out of work now not because of failings of their own but because of gross negligence and dishonesty at the executive level. The rank and file will pay the price while most of the trading floor folk and their superiors, particularly their superiors, have nest eggs or even millions in assets and might not even have to work again as long as they could ratchet down their "lifestyles" a notch or three.

What really rankles people is the idea of CEOs and the like, who are ultimately reasonable for the failure of their firms, having the gall to squawk about a compensation cap or more strenuous government oversight because they have accepted tax-payer bail out money, but have, for the most part, shown no contrition for their almost unprecedented mistakes and malfeasance and in a number of cases attempted to carry on business-as-usual (Wells Fargo and AIG come to mind). In a better world, they'd be stripped of their personal assets and looking at jail terms. How is today's situation all that different from what happened with Enron?

However, if you don't affix blame (how Bush-like - "Hell of a job their, Brownie.") and punish those culpable it happens all over again. I realize that "the Street" will eventually find or be allowed to screw a lot of us over again even if we did draw and quarter people like Kerry Killenger, but at least we can clear the deck now and make those people responsible pay for their crimes and crimes these are.

If you don't like the compensation models, then you don't support free markets...period! Just have the balls to come out and say so. -- danb

It has nothing to do with compensation per se. Free markets only work with a free flow of information. A perfect example in this case is bond rating agencies giving AAA ratings to securities containing upwards of 70% of mortgages with adjustable rates that even a "master of the universe" would find difficult to pay and were sure to fail.

Investors have been conditioned to trust the rating agencies as (mostly) impartial arbiters of value. In this case, they were aiding and abetting a fraud by misrepresenting the qualities of the securities.

Withholding information or misrepresenting a product is a "market failure" that happens on an almost daily basis in capitalism because far too many people involved are dishonest and can gain from this dishonesty. This is why we need government intervention in the economy to assure that as much honesty and transparency as possible is available to anyone wishing to participate.

. . . one Escalade at a time.

As the last major nation to fully industrialize, the Chinese have really blown it. They failed to learn a single thing from the mistakes made in Europe, the U.S. and Japan over the course of the 20th Century.

Disposable wealth is a requirement to improve everyone's standard of living. The Left hates disposable wealth, so they legislate against it.

No. The left does not "hate disposable wealth" nor have they in my 50 years ever "legislated against it." Personally, I love "disposable wealth." I'd like to have about $100K a year more of it, and I'm about as liberal as one can be who isn't a socialist.

. . . You want to punish people who have succeeded, and do so only because for some reason you consider the success of others to be unfair. -- Xanthro

No. We want to punish the dishonest assholes that did much to fuck-up the current economy. And we want to punish them double-plus good when they bitch about relinquishing a bit of control through greater oversight and/or salary/spending caps after asking for federal money to help save the institutions that their dishonesty and/or incompetence caused to fail.

That inequality is transient. People move up and down the economic scale all the time. -- Xanthro

Socio-income brackets are pretty fossilized in the U.S., with real wages declining for nearly 30 years now. The problem over the last eight years is that the wealth gap between the top and the bottom in the U.S. has spread dramatically. The already wealthy have become more so almost entirely on preferential tax rates while middle income levels have been flat or declined.

http://economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/PEW_EMP_MOBILITY_1984_TO_2004_KEY_FINDINGS.pdf

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html

http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2007/05useconomics_morton.aspx

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3518560

http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/103683.pdf