Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, left, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, at a meeting of G20 finance ministers earlier this month. (AP)

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Wall Street took home astounding pay packages before the economy crashed last fall, and the aftermath was disaster. Critics as big and sober as former Fed chair Paul Volker say crazy pay helped drive the risk that drove the meltdown.

Now, from the G20 to Congress to the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department, there are calls for some limits on the hyper Wall Street pay that helped crash — some say corrupt — the economy.

Will it happen? Will the mega-bonuses be reined in? How? And how much?

This hour, On Point: The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson on taming Wall Street pay.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Gretchen Morgenson, columnist and assistant business and financial editor at The New York Times. She’s editor of the new book, “The Capitalist’s Bible.”

Joining us from Los Angeles is Kevin Murphy, chair of the Department of Finance and Business Economics at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and professor at the USC School of Law. In June, he testified before the House Financial Services Committee on executive pay and risks to the financial system.

A rare bottle of 1995 Dom Perignon being sold for $14,950 in New York on Dec. 13, 2006. The $15,000 bottle is an example of how record Wall Street bonuses trickled through New York City's economy. (AP)

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Ah, late December. For years now, if you were part of America’s financial services industry, this was the time of big, beautiful bonuses.

Gigantic bonuses. Billions in bonuses that built palatial mansions and sucked bright young Americans into Wall Street and numbers crunching. This was compensation so big that it changed the basic distribution of income in this country and built a towering cliff of super-rich money mavens.

And then, the money mavens seemed to drive the whole U.S. economy off a cliff.

Were the incentives wrong? This hour, On Point: Huge pay, huge bonuses, and where they brought us.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Louise Story, business reporter for The New York Times. Her big story last week was headlined “On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real.” She also reports on how banks are trying to find new ways to handle bonuses.

Lucian Bebchuck, professor of law, economics, and finance and director of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School. He’s the author of “Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation.”

Steven Kaplan, professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago Business School.