Shareholders' risk, Wall Street's reward

After nearly 18 months spent doing triage on one of the worst financial crises in our nation's history, there is now a shred of hope that those who are in a position to do something about the root cause of the problem - Wall Street's bloated and ineffective compensation system - just might act.

Late last month, Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and then Andrew Cuomo, New York's attorney general, demanded from the surviving Wall Street chief executives reams of data about their bankers and traders who were paid more than $250,000 in the past few years. The two politicians also asked for information on bonuses this year, which is destined to be one of the least profitable ever on Wall Street.

The impetus for the requests was the $125 billion these firms just received from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the genuine concern that part of that money would be used to pay 2008 bonuses rather than to shore up firms' capital or to begin to thaw the frozen credit markets.