Let the Loophole Finding And Cross-Border Defecting Begin

This morning just about every daily paper and its mother picked up The Wall Street Journal’s piece on the potential loopholes lurking inside President Obama’s half-a-million-dollar cap on compensation for senior executives at TARP participating firms. Stating the obvious, the Journal says firms won’t just stand by and let their top employees’ compensation be mowed down and instead will enlist fancy lawyers, among other folks, to find ways to keep the money flowing. (If you can create securities that no one can understand and thus no one can figure out how to regulate, then you can certainly figure out how to bypass a little bill created by Congress, right?)

In related news, capitalizing on the cap, Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann put out an open call to all U.S. dealmakers who want to make millions, saying, in effect, "If you’re not happy with that cap thing, come work for us, we can pay you boatloads. No cap here!"