I join you in your outrage, but it sure looks like, as I've seen, these bonuses were contractually obligated.  Terrible contracts, like making a contract to pay $1,000 for a bag of potato chips, but when made between competent parties, a perfectly valid contract.  I guess I fear that if Democrats go at this too much but then don't do anything about it (they can't, it looks like), won't that just lead to a populist backlash against Dems?

I would love to see financial firms be more heavily regulated with regards to compensation moving forward - there is no logical reason for the bulk of these people's compensation to be paid in "bonuses."  It ceases to be a bonus when it's an expected part of your compensation.  It seems like these firms are having trouble differentiating between "bonuses" and "commissions" if you ask me, but I guess the problem is that a commission is tied to a measurable goal but, in the twisted financial world, a bonus is merely tied to whether or not they like you.

The $100 million to $200 million in bonuses is absurd...but it's got nuthin' on the $2 trillion TALF subsidy about to be sold off to a totally unregulated hedge fund industry...and for them, abso-freakin'-lutely NO compensation limits, whatsoever?

What's wrong with this picture?

Fed Eliminates Compensation Limits for TALF Program
By Scott Lanman

March 3 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury eliminated executive-compensation limits for companies that bundle loans accepted under a new $1 trillion program, indicating the rules may have hampered efforts to start the plan.

The rules won't apply to the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility out of "desire to encourage market participants to stimulate credit formation and utilize the facility," the New York Fed said in a document on its Web site today. The government separately said it will expand the TALF to support vehicle-fleet leases and loans for business, construction and farm equipment.

The change suggests the government doesn't intend to apply compensation limits beyond firms that receive direct investments from the Treasury's $700 billion bailout fund. Officials have yet to announce whether such requirements will be imposed on firms participating in a separate effort to remove as much as $1 trillion of distressed assets from banks' balance sheets.

"Just like salesmen toward the end of the month get kind of worried if they're not meeting their quota, the Federal Reserve has got to worry," former Fed monetary-affairs director Vincent Reinhart said. Today's moves are "an attempt to make the facility more accommodating," said Reinhart, now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

No. They may want to and I think they all want to, but there's nothing they can legally do to stop it.

The administration and Congress are looking for any legal means. It looks like they have been able to keep big bonuses from being paid out in the future...but like I said, we are angry not because the administration did nothing to stop it, but because they can't.

In the end, I haven't really heard anyone talk about it today in the frame of "Why is Obama not stopping this?" instead it's being framed as "These people (AIG) are screwing us and our government" So the effect to Obama's popularity will probably be minimal...except on the blogs.

Geez. I am getting to the point, I am afraid to read the paper.

Nancy Pelosi and most of the rest of DC signed onto this package.  No one knew exactly how it would go down, but we would all get screwed one way or another in this deal.  Period.

Tangent time:

The housing bubble, the credit card lifestyle, and the ensuing bailout were all completely predictable disasters to anyone willing to look at it honestly.  I am not a smart person, and I could tell from a very long time ago that all three of the above items were bad ideas and signaled something fundamentally wrong.  At some point, you realize that nothing was being done or said about this stuff because the people involved were making serious bank off of this.  It was not a failure of intelligence or of knowledge.  It was a failure of leadership.

Tangent continues....

This is why people like Sarah Palin have any place in our national discussion.  There is a sense among many people that the brain-trust of this country has failed spectacularly.  And so, she symbolizes a rebellion against that brain trust.  People like Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank are supposed to know better than this.  And they do.  But they have allowed themselves to become tools of the things they are supposed to be overseeing.  So, the brainless-trust gets footing in the national discourse.

You are wrong.

Congress certainly can interfere with private contracts, because of a little thing called the Commerce Clause.

It's only the states that cannot.

http://supreme.justia.com/us/294/240/

"(f) Private contracts must be understood as having been made subject to the possible exercise of the rightful authority of the Government, and their impairment, resulting from such exercise, is not a taking of private property for public use without compensation, or a deprivation of it without due process of law. Pp. 294 U. S. 304-305."

and the OYEZ project some mail, asking them for a SCOTUS case that might have relevance.

When I get something, I will do a thread.

I may be wrong, but at least since I have been following SCOTUS, I can remember NO case where the Congress was able to abrogaite a legal employment contract where fraud or some other underying crime was not involved.

Who actually studies this stuff at the SCOTUS level, because we KNOW you are doing your usual trying to shift the question at hand...

But, the questions is not IF congress Can PASS that bill,  but if it stands up in court.

Now, We are ALL just speculating.

The difference is, he teaches course in the SCOTUS, so just maybe he knows more then you or I:

Ok, here's my first hit back from a REAL lawyer: