Saw in the WSJ Today:

Only news to executives who think saving the company's profits for a rainy day: Page 2, Deal Reached on Bank Crackdown -

A deal between the Treasury Department and a key House Democrat would give the government sweeping new powers to police the country's largest financial companies, including the ability to seize and break up failing companies and order large firms to shrink.
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The proposal would require financial firms with more than $10 billion of assets to pay for the unwinding of a collapsed competitor. The measure would also give the Federal Reserve the power to direct any large financial holding company to sell or transfer assets or stop certain activities if the central bank determined there could be a "threat to the safety and soundness of such company or to the financial stability of the United States."

What about those unsupervised medium-sized companies?!

What about average Americans with savings? Shouldn't they be told to share their savings for those without?

And why not let the other unions cover the costs of failed pension plans by their peers? We're starting to see the logic here....

Holman Jenkins writes about the pay czar and unintended consequences in his op-ed, Washington's Suicide Mission: The real problem is Washington's riverboat gamble on saving the economy with free money.

Members of the Obama administration have taken turns deploring the billions of dollars in year-end bonuses the finance industry is getting ready to hand out. Never mentioned is what they think firms should do with the money. Give it back to their customers? Spend it on office decorations?

Firms can't just wish away revenue sitting on their books. That's an accounting crime. More to the point, aren't surging banker bonuses amid a general downturn the proximate and necessary outcome of Washington's recovery Heimlich, which involves doling out free money to banks and artificially goosing asset prices?

Er, wasn't this the plan?