First, let me say that I believe that many, many people who work in the financial sector, particularly on Wall Street, are way overpaid. I've been saying that for more than two decades, and I've been retired from banking for one of those two decades.

I've also said here that for the government to think they can outsmart the bonus-driven culture of Wall Street is pure and unadulterated folly. Remember the law that Congress passed to limit executive bonuses in banks to no more than $500,000? How long did it take the banks to simply increase the base salaries of executives by huge amounts to avoid the restriction of the new law? A couple of months?

There's another current story of a guy that works for a subsidiary of Citicorp called Phibro. Phibro is an international commodities trading firm. If you recall, Citi is probably the weakest of the big banks and if they haven't taken more of the TARP money than anyone else, they're close. They are still a vastly undercapitalized, very weak bank.

Anyway, this Phibro employee is an expert in trading oil futures. He has a contract with Phibro that he will be paid a fixed percentage of the gains he produces by trading oil contracts. This year his bonus will be about $100 million. He truly did make Phibro and Citi a huge amount of money. In fact, it's been documented that his trading alone has had a major impact on the periodic escalation of the price of oil and the cost of gasoline. His profit-making activities for Citicorp truly has moved markets, much to the detriment of all the world economies and all of us personally.

But those are not his problems. Trading oil futures is perfectly legal, regardless of the effect on oil and gas prices. And he has a contract that pays him a percentage of the money he earns for his employer. He is very good at what he does and has a contractual right to the bonus money. If the terms of his "deal" with Phibro were to be lessened, there are dozens of other firms that would hire him on the same basis overnight. If he left Phibro/Citi, future monies he might earn for them would be lost, of course.

So, if you were the "bonus czar", what would you do? You might...and I mean only "might"...be able to slow down the payment of the bonus. But there is no question that Phibro has a legal obligation to pay the man. If as czar you dictated that his bonus deal be changed, he'd simply go to work for another firm that never took any TARP money and wasn't under the regulatory control of you, as czar.

What would you do? All this is an example of my assertion that there is no sense in the government attempting to control, regulate or even influence Wall Street. Those guys are way smarter than anyone that works in government and with the lure of huge bonuses, they will have no trouble whatsoever staying two or three steps ahead of the feckless government employees. Even if our government became totally socialist, as many here assert they already are, the financial markets are well-established world wide, so if certain transactions were made illegal here in the U.S., the people who did them could simply move to somewhere else where they have no prohibitions or controls on what they do. A nice, warm place like the Cayman Islands might do nicely.

So again I ask, Mr. Czar--what would you do?