Nice of these folks to start considering harm. It was apparently not a consideration when putting millions of hard working people out of work and out of their homes around the world, but now that some multimillionaires might go to work for other multimillionaires... it has become grave and irreparable harm can be done.

And Congress and our presidents (both Bush and Obama) have decided that those folks who have gotten us (and the world) into this mess MUST be supported at all costs.

Makes sense to me... we supported them before and look what it has gotten us.

My view: The rich and powerful are deciding that remaining rich and powerful is the ONLY consideration. Everything else is of no consequence, and if and when this country goes down the tubes... they are making certain they will remain on top.

The almost six trillion dollars already given out... if used to pay off 90% of the mortgages in this country... would have given a HUGE amount of money to the banks, and the homeowners would have now actually OWNED their homes and would have lots of extra money to spend in the economy, keeping the unimployment to zero.

But actually HELPING anyone but themselves was never... and is not now... a consideration... IMHO

... and don't forget to vote those mobsters back into office again, folks, so they can finish the job...

Charge him with contempt and slap him in jail until he testifies. He can ask for his deposition to be sealed, but as far as I know (and I am not a lawyer), the only grounds for not testifying would be the fifth amendment.

Wait.. the argument is that disclosure of the bonuses might lead to competitors luring these folks away?

First of all... since these folks ran Merrill into the ground, why would they be such hot properties to headhunters?

And second, who's gonna hire them? Bear Stearns? Lehman? CitiGroup? WaMu? Drexel Burnham Lambert?

Look, it's pretty obvious that BofA just doesn't want to deal with the embarrassment that will follow the disclosure.

It is to bad that it is neccesary to bribe people to do a good job. Donald Trump has a procedure for those who do not do the job well. It is called "Your Fired". The salaries of the top executives are, in itself, absorbant so why are bonuses required. Bribery? My next question is: "do they get bonuses when their division is not profitable?" Sure they do. The reason that BOA bought Merril Lynch was that the company was not solvent and was going bankrupt so the rest of the story is: these executives did not do their jobs well enough to keep ML solvent. My next question question is: how come these people got bonuses in the first place?"

The primary lesson to learn from the present collapse of the American economy is that merit, competence and good intentions have absolutely nothing to do with who rises to the top leadership positions in corporate America.

There has been a myth put forward, at least since Reagan, that those who rise to leadership in the private sector are the best decisionmakers and deserve incredible financial rewards. The whole paradigm of 'trickle down economics' required the acceptance of this myth, because the lynchpin of the argument is that this business elite has some special talent, and we all benefit from them being at the helm.

Sorry folks, it's just a small, exclusive insider's club, much like the old European nobility === the biggest Ponzi scheme ever.

JDoughey said it well. Here's the hard thing for me, as someone who worked hard to get Obama elected (though I did not wholly believe in him from the outset, as many did): A lot of the crisis response now consists of bailing out people who don't deserve it, on the grounds that if they are not bailed out, vast numbers of innocents will be impoverished. Which is true. There's a lot of outrage about this, but the administration could point to the alternative and say, we're only doing what we must.

The problem I'm worried about is that these "innovative" (what a BS word) instruments - CDO's and CDS's - have structurally altered the economic system. They shouldn't have been allowed to, but they were - due to lobbying and to legislative deregulators like Gramm. I get angry at the "too big to fail" arguments for bailouts, it's hostage-taking, but then I realize that the horse left the barn when they were allowed to set up their businesses this way to begin with - no reporting requirements on these new items, no oversight, "different" accounting, risk, and conflict standards, and on the TPM front page today, exemption from creditor processes in bankruptcy. WTF?

Now that all of that has happened, and the toxic crap is everywhere, how can the current admin unwind the crime without taking down the system? And if they do take down the system, will history blame them instead of their predecessors (who created this)? If it's a choice between essentially continuing the crime (see Josh's Fed reporting today) and killing the system, the people I worked to put in place will in fact continue the crime, where they feel they have to.

So this is hostage-taking and it's an outrage. But the outrage actually occurred when they were allowed to set up this carnival of f***ery in the first place. The crime has now become the system and the top 1% is forcing us to give them even more to ransom the system back (which may be impossible). They are almost permanently decoupled from the rest of us now. How do you get that back? How do you undo it?

I would like to see the vast ill-gotten gains forcibly returned, even if the activity wasn't technically illegal (lobbying again), but if that were tried it would be called "class warfare" - using 20th-c. tropes on 21st-c. financial crime (finance AS crime). I can't decide whether I blame the admin for not going there, or not. This isn't my granddad's class system! And it's not his economic system or his business world either. We may have already been pitched into feudalism and not know it yet. I think we need to wake up to that. (Sorry for length of comment.)

Why don't we start a petition circulated to B of A customers that states they will withdraw their deposit in mass if they don not disclose this information?

Lewis' acquisitions (Fleet Financial, Countrywide, Nation'a Bank,Merrill Lynch) were done at the wrong time and at the wrong price. It is only proper that he should be fired and thrown onto the ash heap of other fallen CEO's. His bone headed decision to take his corporate jet to meet with Mr. Cuomo and his refusal to identify bonus recipients from Merrill are further justifications for the Board to realize that his judgment has steered the company onto the rocks.Apparently the market agrees which now values BAC stock at $4/share.

What I find most instructive here is:

"because it would let competitors know which areas of B of A's business the company considers most valuable"

Like laundering the war profits of Hallibuton, Ker Mcgee, KBR and Kellog Brown & Root, et.al.