US President Barack Obama has announced pay curbs for bankers; in France, Nicolas Sarkozy is to restrict traders' rewards. Here in the UK, part-nationalised banks are still doling out bonuses, while Lord Mandelson bleats that they should consider "how it looks".

Restraining top bankers' pay is not a PR exercise, as Mandelson appears to believe; it is a necessary part of healing and re-making the banking system. Our politicians should emulate Obama and leave the nationalised bankers in no doubt that their role is now that of public servants, and that they will be paid accordingly. The Obama plan to cap pay at $500,000 has plenty of loopholes, but that doesn't detract from its powerful symbolism: excessive rewards will no longer be tolerated. Mandelson, Darling and Brown, however, still seem to be in the grip of "BankThink" - that warped worldview in which large bonuses are not only reasonable, but necessary.

BankThink maintains that curbing bonuses will lead to a brain drain from the sector. What brains are those? I guess it must be the great intellects who can't see a problem with creating the credit crunch, then asking taxpayers on the average income (about £25,000 - a year, not an hour) to fund their bonuses. Adherents to BankThink say big bonuses attract the best people. They don't: they attract the soulless, the amoral and the avaricious. Professions such as teaching and medicine - and, yes, politics - draw in excellent practitioners without ludicrous rewards.

Regulation, of pay or anything else, is anathema in BankThink: we are told it is pointless trying to regulate top pay because some people will find ways round it. True, but so what? Most people will comply with new regulation, and it can drive cultural change; tougher drink-driving laws, for instance, have made it socially unacceptable to get behind the wheel with a few glasses of Piat d'Or under your belt - unexceptional behaviour in the 1970s.

Bloated executive pay at banks and other firms does not represent a fair reward for talent, as BankThink would have you believe, but a huge market failure engineered with the connivance of weak remuneration committees, venal headhunters and unchallenging shareholders. It has undermined the moral authority of business leaders, made organisations more resentful and less productive, torn at the fabric of society and torpedoed the work ethic, by severing any recognisable link between effort and reward.

It is not only top bankers, but executives in general, who have stoked the excess. A US study last year found chief executives at the top 500 companies received pay packages worth, on average, $10.5m - or 344 times the earnings of the average worker. As Peter Drucker, the management writer, has argued, that ratio ought to be brought right back down - he suggests to the region of 20:1 or 25:1. What motivates people is not necessarily absolute sums of money, but how well they are doing in relation to others, and the beauty of linking the boss's pay to that of the average worker is that his staff's earnings would have to rise in order for him to earn more.

Ordinary bank staff, many of them on modest salaries, are finding their own small bonuses also under attack. I sympathise. They have been badly let down by their bosses; but a better alignment between the boardroom and the banking hall would reduce the risk of it happening again.

Boardroom clones face up to the truth, now they need to add a bit of diversity

FTSE 100 boards are still stuffed with white, middle-aged, middle-class men, a fact I have lamented in the pages of this newspaper. At least, though, they seem to recognise it as a problem.

Research commissioned by accountancy firm KPMG found business leaders were aware that their company boards are very narrowly constituted and see life through a lens distorted by class, cultural and gender privilege. They haven't done anything about it yet, but self-knowledge is a good start.

The KPMG research backs up my view that this lack of diversity led to a "dissent deficit", which in turn contributed to the financial meltdown: when boards are full of identikit directors, there is unlikely to be enough debate

or challenge. This is not just about getting more women at the top table: it is also about more diversity in terms of race and social class.

As the credit crunch has shown, a monocultural boardroom is not just outmoded and politically incorrect: it is a commercial weakness.

Second wave of crunch will wipe out pensions

If anyone still doubts the destructive force of the credit crunch, consider the second-wave effects on pensions. It's a little noticed fact, but 290 company pension schemes with 120,000 members are already in a queue for a bail-out from the over-stretched government Pension Protection Fund.

Between them, the 225 companies in the FTSE 350 which operate final-salary pension schemes are shouldering a deficit of £163bn; according to a report by actuary firm Hymans Robertson, that shortfall has risen five-fold in the past year in relation to the companies' market value. In the case of 37 companies - including industrials such as GKN and all the high-street banks except HSBC - unmatched pension liabilities are in excess of their stock market value.

Industrial companies are still suffering from the last recession, which has left them groaning under a pensions legacy out of all proportion to lean, post-Thatcherite manufacturing; this time banks and retailers will suffer the strain. Companies need to have adult conversations with employees and unions and come up with a strategy, but most are remarkably reluctant to embark on this.

From the point of view of shareholders - including, er, pension funds - it is disastrous, as unchecked retirement liabilities will act as a drain on corporate earnings for decades. From the point of view of pension fund members, it is even worse, as their savings for old age could be at risk.

Why have chief executives mortgaged their businesses to their pension funds in this hugely risky fashion? Why have they failed to put in place secure funding for their own staff's retirement nest eggs? It has been all too easy to kick the issue into the long grass. Most chief executives have shown little urgency to tackle pension problems, since the benefits might not be seen for 30 years, and certainly will not boost next year's bonus. The crisis in Britain's corporate pension schemes is yet another product of short-termism and skewed management incentives.