Most big banks, however, are now free to pay their employees as they see fit, now that they have repaid their bailout funds. To Wall Street critics and, indeed, many ordinary Americans, the prospect of a new era of Wall Street wealth, so soon after the financial collapse, and with so many people out of work, seems shocking. Some see the coming round of bonuses as evidence that policy makers failed to reform pay practices that in, some cases, fostered the risky businesses that lead to the financial crisis in the first place.

“There’s a universal discomfort with the levels of compensation we’re seeing in the financial system,” said Jonathan Koppell, a professor of public policy at the Yale School of Management. “The idea that private institutions should be walled out from government intervention is harder to swallow when in the last year government intervention was quite welcome in the form of billions of dollars in bailouts.”

Many on Wall Street were waiting anxiously to see what Goldman would do. Goldman is enjoying one of the most profitable years in its 140-year history, and its rapid recovery has made the bank a lightning rod.

Much of the resentment has been directed at Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, who after first staunchly defending the bank’s profits and pay, and then bristling at calls for restraint, apologized for mistakes that led to the financial crisis.

Image Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, instituted the new executive compensation system, which emphasizes pay in stock. Credit... Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Mr. Blankfein declined a bonus last year. In 2007, he was paid about $67.5 million, a Wall Street record. This year, he and 29 other top executives will receive bonuses that could be quite large, but they will be in the form of what Goldman called “shares at risk,” or stock that cannot be sold for five years and can be retracted if the executive does something that hurts the firm. Goldman has long paid a portion of bonuses in stock.

Goldman also announced on Thursday that, for the first time, it would give its shareholders a say in determining compensation. The vote would be nonbinding, however.