In the long term scheme of things it's not that important though, you're right that overall compensation is the issues, and it's way too high. Part of this is just my bias showing but a lot of it is just in the data.

For an industry that provides marginal utility there is no way they deserve that much.

So when your boss cuts your wages you will tell him how grateful you are right? I have a friend in contracts with a firm, makes 45 thou and does a great job and deserves his bonus, which was trotted out to get him to agree to his salary. A year ago he was a temp. And there are the 35 thou a year secretaries, would you feel for them? My point being again It's not all multi-million dollar bonuses to CEO's and we should stop acting like it is.

Nope, there value is so high because there are limited number of people who can or want to do their jobs. Smae reason football players, actors, singers, artist, make big bucks on the top end.

Maybe it’s just me, but I even have a hard time feeling genuinely sympathetic for “the bond guy who make(s) under 150 thou a year and who plans for that money.” As the economy has continued to erode and many have lost their jobs, teachers, construction workers, retail clerks, engineers, waitresses, mechanics, all of whom presumably had plans for the money THEY would have earned in their lost jobs, 145 thou a year bond guy, working for what can only charitably be characterized as a failed enterprise, and slurping the bailout swill that the “masters of the universe” wrested from taxpayers and poured into his trough, still feels unseemly to me.

And yet, in retrospect, none of this is surprising. The principle fiction underlying the obscene compensation of those “masters of the universe” is that the market determines their compensation based purely and irreducibly on their value. This fiction becomes, has become, deeply rooted and self-fulfilling (for a time). In their minds, the cause-effect relationship between compensation and value has conveniently shed every other factor: externalities, structural effects, market inefficiencies, personal biases, etc., etc. Stripped of these considerations the compensation logic is circular.

Why is their compensation so high? Because of their value! How do we know they are so valuable? Because they require such high compensation! Such simple positive feedback systems eventually consume all available resources destroying themselves in the process. But From their vantage, and applying this impeccable logic, it appears to the masters, for the time being, that the excesses are those of the mere rabble. How dare they question the value of their economic aristocracy?! The unfortunate history of the world has repeatedly demonstrated that when aristrocracy becomes insensitive to the rabble in this way, their breakthrough understanding is usually delivered through pitchforks, either real or metaphorical. My advice? Invest in pitchforks.