Back when the execrible Wall Street Bailout bill was before Congress, The New York Times and also Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture blog called for a "claw back" provision to the TARP program, pointing out that at the same time as Wall Street firms needed nearly $1Trillion from taxpayers to stay solvent, their CEO's and other senior executives were keeping monstrous bonuses for what turned out to be fictitious profits. Writedowns in the $ hundreds of billions had completely wiped awary the alleged profits of years' past.

Needless to say, that paeon fell on deaf ears.

Today CNBC has an article on exactly how egregious those bonuses were.