Note: I am not recommending this solution but I am sure that someone has or is seriously considering it.

Giving some of the most egregious offenders on the bonuses a personal bonus, such as an ounce of lead at high velocity.

Once again, I'm not condoning or suggesting it, it is just something that wouldn't surprise me in the least if I read it in the news. Attitudes like those quoted by the OP in the initial post are sure to aggravate the problem also, especially when those articles and comments get into the MSM.

Thralen

If fractional reserve banking did not exist we would enver have been able to muster the surplus capital for the large engineering projects like aircraft manufacture and many of the huge oil rigs.

It may have got us in the brown stuff, but by god did we have a party getting here.

If fractional reserve banking did not exist we would enver have been able to muster the surplus capital for the large engineering projects like aircraft manufacture and many of the huge oil rigs.

It may have got us in the brown stuff, but by god did we have a party getting here.

John Kenneth Galbraith : The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

A poll of Bloomberg customers released last week revealed that 21 percent of traders, analysts and fund managers polled in the U.S. expect their 2009 bonuses to be bigger than last year. Another 24 percent expect their bonuses to be about the same, which is pretty good when you consider the employment woes of the rest of the nation. Frustrated taxpayers wonder how they got into a mess where $700 billion of their money went to bailing out people who today are poised to pocket record amounts in some cases (9 percent in the Bloomberg survey).

Argument Trumped

In the financial industry, though, the attitude of entitlement trumps any argument that there would be no job, no employer and no paycheck without the bailouts.

In fact, those Bloomberg customers said any limits on pay will boomerang. Asked “Do you think limits on executive compensation in the financial industry will do more to control excessive risk-taking or more to discourage useful innovation?” 65 percent of the ones working in the U.S. said limits on pay would choke innovation.

Knowing what we do about innovation in finance, we wouldn’t want that to happen.

Are there actually credible people worried that capitalism will be brought to its knees if restrictions on pay, and related reforms in regulation, are imposed on Wall Street?

Easing the Rules

NYSE Euronext Chief Executive Officer Duncan Niederauer, who is either tone deaf to the public’s disgust or secure in the belief that the public’s anger doesn’t matter, told the Wall Street Journal last week that he’s worried that regulatory changes in the works in Washington will determine whether New York City can compete in the world. I’m having a déjà vu moment. Didn’t we try, and fail, at the idea of ratcheting down our rules to the levels of competing countries?

The high standards of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act give “the perception of heavy regulation” on the NYSE, he said, and a proposed tax on securities transactions (intended in one bill to be used to refill the coffers Wall Street depleted) could have “disastrous consequences” for entrepreneurs trying to tap into the U.S. equity markets.

I’m glad Niederauer brought that up, because the notion of a smart person having a great idea and building a business to the point where it goes public is just what I think of when I hear the word “innovation.”