Madness! Madness!*

The Wall Street Journal reported today that:

Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year — a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street's pay culture.

In a post named "Burn It Down and Salt the Earth," Kevin Drum's response was a bull's eye:

I sort of feel like I've run out of things to say about this. There's an insanity here that's almost beyond analysis. Wall Street can spark an economic slowdown that misses destroying the planet and causing a second Great Depression only by a hair's breadth — said hair being an 11th hour emergency infusion of trillions of taxpayer dollars — and then turn around and use those trillions to return to bubble levels of profitability within a year. And they can do it even though the rest of the economy is still suffering through the worst recession since World War II. It's mind boggling.

Amen. Read the whole thing here.

* This is a reference to a line in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Okay, maybe a little obscure.