So it’s finally coming down. The pay czar has studied the situation. Thought about it. And declared his intention to send a message. Pay for the top 175 executives at the financial institutions that took a bailout are to have their base pay cut by as much as 90%, and total comp by 50%.  Seven companies will be affected. Of course, we don’t know precisely which executives are on the hook, but I think we can draw our own conclusions.

America has been waiting for quite some time to see some green blood in the water, and this move only begins to address the underlying rage our nation feels at Wall Street and its minions. Still, you have to feel a twinge of empathy for these 175 individuals who are the first to shoulder the blame for all that our financial institutions have done to screw up our economy. Thousands were involved, of course, but these 175 must stand in the forefront of their cadre, trembling, as their golden parachutes are folded up and put away, their ceremonial swords broken over the knee of the government.

Think of the sacrifices that these few, unlucky individuals will have to bear! Here are just a few:

• Significant and immediate cutbacks in philanthropic activity.
• The new yacht will have to be canceled. Last year’s model will have to do.
• The private jet will have to go. At best a Netjet time share will fill in the gap, but it’s quite possible that from here on in some of these folks will have to fly commercial. That’s huge.
• That third home in East Hampton or Malibu will be put on the block; some executives will even be down to just one primary residence.
• No Easter break in St. Bart’s for the entire extended family, and the compound in Martha’s Vineyard will have to be leased out for the entire month of August.
• Taxicabs instead of car and driver. While the occasional limo may be a possibility, waiting time is out of the question.
• Some club memberships will have to be winnowed out, leaving perhaps only one golf and one beach and tennis club for the foreseeable future.
• Support payments to former spouses will have to be renegotiated.

Obviously, dire times call for dire measures. Whether the radical actions contemplated by the Federal Government are warranted, or are too much, too soon, has yet to be ascertained.

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

You know, I think it’s kind of nice how my bank is always thinking of new ways to help me. It’s been like that my whole life. When I was a kid, for instance, my dad took me downtown to the First National Bank, which was right next door to the Alceon Theater, where you could watch two movies for a quarter on Saturday afternoons. I had ten weeks’ allowance in my pocket — five dollars, all in Benjamin Franklin fifty-cent pieces. That’s when “all about the Benjamins” meant something! Anyhow, we gave Mr. Roover, who sat at a desk by the door, my life savings at that point, and he gave me a little blue book that had all my information in it. “Every month,” my dad told me, “the bank is going to add a little bit of money to your account as a way of saying thanks for your deposit. It’s called interest. And it will grow and grow until you have a lot more than you put in.” I thought that was pretty keen, let me tell you. And I still do.

The years passed, and I got new banks, but each of them did the same kinds of nice things for me. One time, I got a toaster for opening a new account. I think I still may have it someplace. Another time, they let me pick out my very own theme for my checks. I got really cool NASCARs. The interest on my accounts went up and down, depending on the economy, you know, but I know my bank always did its very best to make sure they were adding as much as possible to my nest egg. I appreciated that then, and I do now. I know that someplace, in some office somewhere, there’s always a banker sitting there thinking of new ways to reward his or her customers. That’s just the way they do things, bankers. They’re the salt of the earth.

Which brings us to this year, when it came to my attention that my bank has been doing something secret to help me for quite some time. See, I have a debit card, mostly because I can’t be trusted with a credit card. Oh, I pay my bills and all, but sometimes it’s tough to remember about that, what with all that’s going on every day, and anyway I have a tendency to whip out my plastic all the time instead of using the perfectly good cash I might have in my pocket. So the bills go up up up, and I’m spending somebody else’s money, basically. So I use debit. I always have enough in my bank account to cover my spending, of course, so there’s no problem with that, but when I use that card I don’t owe anybody anything, and I like that a lot. Whatever smart banker thought that up was really using his noggin.

Anyway, there was obviously some other banker somewhere who was also thinking about new ways to make my life safer and easier, and he thought to himself, I guess, “Hey, what if that Mr. Bing who’s been such a good customer for so long, were to make a mistake and plop down his plastic when he didn’t have enough green in the machine? True, he’s never done that, but what if he did?” And so that banker, from the goodness of his heart, I think, went to his boss, who went to his boss, who went to his boss, and pretty soon they gave me something even better than a toaster! It’s called “overdraft protection,” and I never even knew I had it at all until I started reading the papers the last couple of weeks. What a great concept! I love it! No matter what you spend with your debit card, no matter how absent-minded or confused you might be, even if you have no money at all in your account, the nice bank will make sure that you’re not embarrassed. They’ll pay your tab! I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel all warm and toasty.

And I think it’s mighty nice that they sprung it on me as a surprise, too. I love surprises, especially when it has to do with my money.

Now, you read a lot about how people are upset about this thing, but I just don’t get it. Take my friend Patty. She went to the Starbucks the other day and got a chai latte. Lord knows why she drinks that stuff, it tastes like waste water to me, but she likes it and is willing to pay almost $5 for it. Anyway, it seems like she can’t stand to spend any cash, either, because she puts down her debit card to pay for that little sum and then goes out and enjoys her latte, not knowing that she didn’t have the dough in her poke to cover it.

In the old days, she would have had the terrible experience of having this pimply faced kid behind the counter say to her, “Your card is declined, you deadbeat fool.” But not these days! Why? Because Mr. Banker was on the case and had covered her with this overdraft protection, too! Now, does she say thanks? Is she grateful? No way. It seems that a couple of weeks later she got her bank statement and discovered that the bank had charged her a little processing fee for the protection it had provided to her without her even asking for it. Hey! Everybody’s got a cost of doing business, don’t they? I can see she might have wondered why her latte now cost her $34 once that little fee had been assessed. But really. What price can you put on the nice thing that the bank had done? I’d say it’s priceless.

Even better — Mr. Banker and his friends have now listened to ungrateful people like Patty and are implementing their own new rules. They’re promising not to charge that fee to rampant overspenders more than four times in one day. I think that’s very gracious, too, don’t you? I wonder what new things they’ll think of next to help and protect us. One thing’s for sure. I know they’re thinking of something.

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

Sometimes you just don’t know what to think.

On the one hand, there’s Michael Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, which takes an outraged look at the havoc that the financial crisis has caused on your basic, working (or now non-working) American citizen. Yeah, I know, a lot of you folks would drop Mr. Moore off a mountain made of his own money if you had the chance. But the guy can make a case.

His point is that our economic system is controlled by idiots, con-men and selfish, greedy SOBs who don’t give a damn about us and run the system for their own benefit. I don’t think you have to be a flag-waving leftie like Mr. Moore to agree with that one. I think a lot of Glenn Beck people would sign on to that premise.

The fat man in the hat is also righteously peeved that the Government bailed out all those big banks and insurance companies that nearly brought us all down. And again, there’s a fair chunk of right-thinking America that’s hopping mad about that, too. So maybe Moore’s anti-capitalist screed is actually an interesting nexus at the point where right and left converge in hatred of the system that rewards failure and lets the bad guys run the next iteration of the machine. Nobody ever lost money at this point underestimating the anger of the American people.

And of course we all have plenty to be angry about. We could spend the next decade yelling at, prosecuting and punishing the moral morons and stupid geniuses who gave us our recession.

But then there’s James B. Stewart’s exhaustive, exhausting look at the “Eight Days” that shook the world back in September of 2008, in the September 21st, 2009, issue of The New Yorker. It’s a tick-tock about the week that the guys who run global capitalism bumbled their way toward the decision to go socialist for a while and bail out the system that pays for their limos.  

What you see is how close we all came to losing pretty much everything — our collective life savings, our homes, the insurance that protects us from disaster (subject to acts of God and any other consideration they can think of to avoid paying you).  We get a worm’s-eye view of familiar figures like Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, Lehman’s clueless Dick Fuld, pre-bonus John Thain of Merrill, the gang from AIG, thrashing around trying to figure out how to prevent the entire mess from going down the drain it was circling.

If you haven’t looked it up, you should. If it shows nothing else, it demonstrates how in a crisis the false divisions that separate one global behemoth from another, and private enterprise from Government, dissolve, leaving a management team all working for the same big corporation. You know it. You work for it too.

So that’s where I’m stuck, another year older and deeper in debt, as the old song goes. On the one hand, you’ve got to hate the fact that the miscreants wriggled off the hook, and that in many ways — just like after the fall of Communism in eastern Europe — the same creeps who screwed things up are back running the store, the new boss same as the old boss. All those big bailouts make a lot of people want to scream, and truly, there are so many things to despise about Wall Street. On the other hand, where would we be if the so-called free-marketplace had been allowed to go down, to be righteously allowed to fail? Every single person now reading this, and even those losers who aren’t, would be up the creek.

I don’t know where I come out. I’m confused. So I guess I’ll just handle that like everybody else these days. I’ll get mad! Ah, that feels better!

Oh, the whining over fine dining that’s been heard in the all-but empty bistros of Manhattan as the last expense account executives cut into their exquisitely tender veal and complain about the Obama salary cap!

Sure, a limit on comp will change the make-up of the individuals who surface for the top slots in banking and industry. And that’s a bad thing why? If a company needs a bailout — hey, let’s call it what it is: a handout — shouldn’t it come with certain strings attached? Son, if you want this money for college, you’re not going to be spending it on a car. Right? Only a wayward teen would expect otherwise.

Is $500,000 base, with a bonus to be decided upon performance, an unrealistic sum? It seems so to people accustomed to the good life that was promised to them in business school and the lucre they accumulated during the boom. But where does it fall in the vast scheme of things?

A little review of the factsyields some perspective. The numbers seem kind of unbelievable to me, but then I live in a variety of charming urban areas where a dinner for two that comes in under $100 is considered an eyepopping steal.

Median base salaries:

Elementary School Teacher: $49,979

Physician: $147,480

Manager: $128,540

Attorney: $88,944 (who are these guys?)

Architect: $56,637

Registered Nurse: $61, 603

Now granted, these are median salaries. The 75th percentile of these jobs, which are arguably every bit as important in our social scheme as that of Banker, are about 20% higher than the median in each case. And of course there are those at the top of their professions that make a lot more. But this gives you some notion of what a base of $500,000 means to just about everybody but a Banker.

I have an idea. How about we open the top slots at failing fiduciary institutions to Teachers, Architects and Registered Nurses? Let’s leave attorneys out of it. They’re already in there somewhere making hay while the the sun don’t shine, I bet.

First of all, let me say that I’m supportive of President Obama’s measures to limit executive pay in companies that accept new bailout money. There are loopholes that I’m sure smart guys will be able to finesse a bit, but for the most part it limits the comp of senior executives working in such firms to $500,000. Now, this may seem like a lot of money to people who do more than push various colors of paper around for a living, but in actuality, for a banker, you might as well be offering a salary of $1 per year. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but not by much. 

So I’m trying to figure out who will be attracted to the job of running the next big bank to suck up some more of the public weal. Who will NOT be taking the job will be anybody who has considered themselves a banker up until now, guys who were trained for it and are now in mid-career, who have built up lives dependent on the kind of money that bankers, up until now, could expect to draw down. It’s not only the base salary that’s a laughable pittance to such individuals. It’s the fact that bonuses will be tied directly to performance, and closely monitored by angry shareholders who have only one criteria for executive success: the stock price. 

Do you have any idea how irrational the stock market is? Great, profitable companies languish in the single digits. Idiotic brain farts out in left field are rewarded with huge multiples. Hoards of lemmings skitter back and forth, driven over a variety of cliffs by fear and greed. Would you want your comp based on that? I don’t think so. Not when there are so many other things you can do. Like be a consultant. 

I figure there are three kinds of people who will be running bailout institutions: 

1. Rich guys who have already made their nuts and who will provide either gravitas or branding power to their crumbling edifices, presiding over a cadre of hungry young pups who do all the work. Think Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffett, Donald Trump. 
2. Young business school graduates who want to make a name for themselves in both Finance and in the governmental functions that will be overseeing that industry; where these dudes used to gravitate to McKinsey to make their bones, they’ll now hop into banking and do a little workout samba on those bongos. 
3. Politicians with a background in accounting. Think about it. Five hundred grand is a molehill to a real banker. But it’s a mountainous pile to a politician. The top job in the field pays less, doesn’t it? 

It remains to be seen whether any of these will be qualified to lead the large fiduciary entities that form the foundation upon which our economy rests. On the other hand, how could they do any worse than the bozos who took all that money to screw things up?