Well, I reckon that puts an end to that meme about the executives leaving the country to work elsewhere... dangit

Too high.

In what other profession could you ruin a company by mismanagement and still try to pay yourself and your underlings a bonus?
Banking is the new Holy Roman Empire- or it has been for awhile and only now are people seeing it.

In some ways, the British Conservatives would be better for our country than the American Democrats. After all, even Margaret Thatcher didn't (or perhaps more accurately couldn't) undo national health insurance. And there's no such thing as the "religious right" in the UK, so the Conservatives aren't beholden to the lunatics.

Where ELSE can you find bonuses for abject failure?

I need to repost my brain-drain blog from Saturday...

Please bear in mind, though, that in Britain there is no discussion of a PAY-cap, as per Obama's plan. Only of a BONUS-cap.

You're implying that British attitudes towards Exec Pay is stricter - when in fact it's the reverse. A £2,000 bonus cap is no major concern when you're still giving yourself a £3m annual salary....

Whatever the merits of the outright caps proposed by McCaskill and Cameron, it seems like there is a way to design a flexible cap that meets some of the President's concerns.

The bottom line here is that the banking sector has shown that much of its expertise was merely self-congratulation. The supposed hotshots weren't actually smart enough to see what was coming. Salary expectations have to go down. Sure, there are still some good people who can make banks money. But most people in the sector were dramatically overpaid.

So let's do something that allows banks to reward truly good people, while enforcing the idea that people who were dramatically overpaid can't make nearly as much as they made when it seemed they knew what they were doing.

Let's put a cap on the combined compensation of the top 10% of people at any bank given TARP funing. That cap should be set at some percentage of compensation in the last three years(arbitrarily, I'll offer 40%, but someone could come up with a better figure).

Thus, a bank whose top people received $900 million in '06; $1 billion in '07 and $1.1 billion in '08 would be limited to compensating the top 10% at an overall total of $400 million.

I'd also index the cap to the change in employment at the bank, so that shrinkage in the workforce doesn't allow them to pay large amounts to a much smaller group of "top" employees.

If they have some really good bankers, they've got ample money to reward them - but only by drastically cutting the compensation of others. SOMEBODY fucked up, and if you think you need to reward a few, take it from those who you now recognize didn't really know what they were doing.

Makes sense to me! ;)

I hope that it catches on in the U.S.; so far the Bankers are running the show even though we have already overpaid for their Banks. Where in hell did this idea of Bailing Out the bastards come from anyway; we'd all be much better off if they just took their failures with them as they exited through the window as more honorable persons did in 29. All we have left in management positions at OUR Banks are the abject failures that created this mess and they have the audacity to tell us we should fear losing their talent; I really wish they had jumped. Politicians and company really think the American public is stupid. It is going to be a tough fight to throw these low-lives out and it will take a united America with leaders that are brilliant strategist to win. I think Pres. Obama is right in his Bipartisan efforts as there are not enough Democrats or Republicans, singularly, with the backbone to fight the fight. In that vein, Sen. Dodd's legislation in the Stimulus Bill was a refreshing surprise and has given me renewed hope for success while President Obama's insistence on cuddling the Banking scum is disappointing.

Just want to point out that the Swedish conservative government also have proposed a cap for executives' compensation in banks taking tax-money. It's not as strict as the british proposal but because of the bank crisis in the 90's the banks have been more careful than banks in most other countries.

An input in the discussion about bank nationalization is also that as many people pointed out this truly comes without warning. Here in Sweden a couple of financial institutions (no big retail banks as in the early 90s) have been nationalized as recently as in december. Actually when it happened to the biggest institute "Carnegie" the responsible Director Generale, Bo Lundgren, just showed up at the bank and demanded entry. When the security in the entrance asked who he was he said: "I own the bank!" And that was the announcement.