The majority of people who are getting canned right now didn't even, as the UAW workers had, get some small vote on how they would effect the shape of their industry. Structured finance and investment funds are only a small part of what investment banks do. Strufin and the mortgage desk are out on their ass, of course--but so are lots of people in M&A; and various investment banking groups that specialized in equity and corporate bonds and wouldn't have known a CDO if it bit them on the ass; corporate and muni bond traders; cap markets guys, and so forth. All their markets dried up because of a credit crisis that they cannot even arguably be credited with creating. It's no more fair that they have to sell their house, move in with the in-laws, and try to figure out what the hell they're qualified for, than that autoworkers have to. Less, maybe, because the autoworkers have had a lot of warning that their companies are on shaky ground. What sort of moral hazard are we reducing by destroying their lives?

That'll teach them to play by the rules all their lives, get a lot of education, and go to work for a bank!

Apparently the message we want to send is "Don't go look for a high-paying job; get a picturesque one."

No one in the financial industry declared that their salaries and perks weren't on the table until some vague and unspecified date in the future, as the UAW has. Actually, from what I understand, the CEO of Lehman tried to, and he was rightly told to go piss up a rope. The executives of the failed banks had a huge portion of their net worth tied up in said banks, and have now lost most of their assets.

That is not to say that we should feel excess sorrow for them, or try to preserve their jobs, or the gargantuan sums that they were paid five years ago. The financial industry was bloated, the salaries out-of-whack with any possible real economic value they could be argued to have provided to anyone, and that will have to change--but we don't need the government to ensure that, because the industry is contracting rapidly, and the worst-hit parts are exactly the places that were most out of line with economic reality. We might like to go back and seize everything they made over the last five years, but for various practical and legal reasons (and arguably even moral ones), we can't, so the pointless fantasizing isn't getting us much of anywhere.

Any CEOs who tried to pay themselves bonuses out of TARP are cretins who should not have been permitted to do so. But aside from John Thain, who didn't create the mess at Merrill--he took over in December 2007 to clean up the destruction, and lost his job less than a year later when he had to merge the bank with BofA to save it--I'm not aware of any CEOs who have been paid any bonuses out of TARP. That's not to say that there aren't any. But the AP's infamous report on outrageous compensation mostly seems to be 2007 funds that we can't claw back because, er, they lost it all in the collapse, or stock options that will only pay off if the firm does well.