"In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Barack Obama said that ""we cannot allow the thirst for reckless schemes that produce quick profits and fat executive bonuses to override the security of our entire financial system and leave taxpayers on the hook for cleaning up the mess."" A day earlier, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told the New York Times that ""you don't want people being paid for taking too much risk.""</br></br>So now the administration wants to control the pay of employees of banks and Wall Street investment firms.</br></br>Kenneth Feinberg, the administration's ""pay czar,"" is being tasked to oversee employee compensation at firms that took bailout money from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Federal Reserve will require thousands of bank holding companies and state banks to submit their compensation plans for approval.</br></br>The administration has it wrong. It wasn't reckless schemes and excessive risk that sunk banks and Wall Street; it was excessive leverage. And thanks to cheap money and twisty regulations, risk was extremely undervalued. Banks owned huge portfolios of real-estate loans and mortgages specifically because they, and regulators, didn't think they were taking much risk at all.</br></br>Populist pay limits are squarely aimed at Wall Street, not local banks, yet for the most part Wall Street doesn't take much risk. Highly profitable investment banking and sales and trading are agency businesses, doing work for customers for a fee. Of course bad trades happen, and there are the rare rogue traders like Barings' Nick Leeson, who hid losses and sunk the firm, or Jerome Kerviel, the young trader who lost $7 billion for the French bank Societe Generale. But Wall Street firms are quite good at managing day-to-day trading risk."