That said, the banks handlded this with the tact of a bull in a china shop.

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While I agree that it would be difficult at best to get by on less than what one has come to expect, isn't that what thousands are learning to do everyday when they are laid-off of their jobs due to the economic downturn hastened into being by the bankers and Wall Street geniuses whose salary would be cut in the first place?

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The other misinfo bullshit is that if they don't get a big bonus on top of their over-paid salary then they'll quit.

Yeah, right. With many equally-experienced, family-supporting, 401K-depleted colleagues out of work, I'd like to see that. (And so would they.)

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That said, the understanding within the banking world of what a large salary and/or bonus is is skewed by years of success.

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If these lump sums are expected, why are they called bonuses? I think a lot of people are pissed because they think that bonuses are tied to job performance and it's hard to see how people at a bailed-out company could have been performing that well.

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That said I do think the financial industry would be better off if the compensation was distributed more heavily toward base salary and away from year-end bonuses. Also, this 18bn is a 44% drop from last year, and NYC is SCREWED in terms of taxes. Le sigh.

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Senior executives does not only mean the stock broker and CEO. It equates to General Counsel, Compliance Offiers, Researchers, Accounting and so on. People who work in the financial sector take MUCH lower salaries then industry standards dictate because their year end incentive (bonus) compensates for the difference.

If you reduce salaries and bonuses you loose good, smart, hard working people who can help fix this situation. You think the financial sector is in trouble now, wait and see what happens if this passes.

And please the President makes 400k a year as long as he is in office. Once he's out he's free to make millions on book deals, speaking tours and the like. No one caps his salary for life.

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Really? I'm sure it will happen to some extent but the finance world pays SO much that I can't imagine that there are too many other things they can do to make that kind if money. Even if it's less than it was before, it's still a lot.

It's one thing to say that, like, teachers salaries are low and people flee to other professions. Or government lawyer salaries are low compared to firm lawyers. But Wall Streeters? Can they really just take their balls and go home?

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Also, boredinacubicle, where are all this poor bonus-less employees going to go? Wall street is a mess there is no place for them to run to because of unemployement.

Funny, how when it was autoworkers who made $50,000 a year in Detorit everyone freaked out.

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i doubt these people are going to be affected by a $400,000 cap on total compensation. most of them would probably be more than happy to make that much a year.

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Nope. That was Republicans being their usual asshole selves. Not I. I have long said that finance people are overpaid, and I don't think $400K is chump change, and I understand people's impulse to punish people that they think caused all of this, but I think this is a bad idea (b/c I think that a WELL REGULATED market actually can work, and I don't like the idea of capping salaries of industries we're mad at). And I honestly do think that people don't understand how compensation works in finance, which is not really their fault, because it works differently than almost anywhere else.

There's a very good and interesting argument to be made that this different system (putting a huge percentage of total compensation in the bonus, rather than salary) contributed to this crisis from CEO to analyst, but this spiel and Obama's before it seem more to be about simple outrage, not let's-have-this-conversation. If that makes sense.

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Your defensive tone is poorly chosen, considering that your entire profession has an enormous bulls-eye on its back right now. I guess you have NO IDEA how politically and culturally tone-deaf it sounds to respond to general public frustrations about ridiculous risk-taking, obscene overcompensation and the utter lack of logic connecting the two with "Duh, you morons are too stupid to understand; it's only CALLED a bonus."

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Enron is going to turn out to be what probably caused this mess. Post-Enron the angry mobs were calling for mark-to-market accounting which is a big part of the mess we're in right now.

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