Last August, as midnight approached on a Friday, two Treasury Department staff members sat in a cramped basement office in the Treasury Building next to the White House and watched as their e-mail in-boxes filled up, writes Steven Brill in The New York Times Magazine. The aides worked for Kenneth Feinberg, the government’s special master for executive compensation, and they were awaiting submissions from companies that had received (and not yet paid back) billions in what federal regulations call “exceptional assistance” from the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. The cover story provides a detailed examination of how Feinberg set the compensation levels at seven TARP recipients. The article concludes that “the clearest lesson that has emerged so far from Feinberg’s nine months of tortured choreography is that if it’s this hard to inject even a limited measure of common sense into the way executives are paid at companies that taxpayers partly own and control, broader change requires a boardroom upheaval.”
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