Why Wall Street bonuses won't go away.

The government is finally cracking down on Wall Street's pay practices. Kenneth Feinberg, the pay czar, delivered word that wards of the state—Citi (C), Bank of America (BAC), and AIG (AIG), among them—must slash pay for top-earning executives. The Federal Reserve followed suit with a promise to review compensation packages at banks it regulates.

Excessive executive compensation at financial services companies is dead!

Long live excessive compensation at financial services companies!

Companies that liberated themselves from the shackles of the TARP are feasting on low-interest rates and other government efforts to prop up markets—and they're partying like its 2007. Goldman Sachs (GS) is setting aside nearly $20 billion in compensation for employees this year—most of it for bonuses. Morgan Stanley (MS) set aside $5 billion for bonuses in the third quarter alone. Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the congressional panel overseeing the TARP, is aghast. "I don't understand that they don't think the world has changed in fundamental ways," she says. Asked earlier this year about the prospect of megabonuses at bailed-out Wall Street firms, President Obama said: "I'd like to think that people would feel a little remorse and feel embarrassed and would not get million-dollar or multimillion-dollar bonuses."

Shame? Self-awareness? Remorse? Come on: These are bankers we're talking about.

President Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, where Warren is on the faculty. But they'd have a better understanding of Wall Street had they spent time in Harvard's anthropology department. That's because bankers must be evaluated the way Margaret Mead approached the cultures she studied—as an insular tribe with its own mores, a society with long-accepted conventions might strike outsiders as bizarre.