…And that number is on your paycheck, and it's gonna make you cry like babies! Um, or not. This week Kenneth Feinberg, the president's pay czar/comp cop/earnings eagle put his foot down with new rules about executive compensation at bailed-out companies — well, for some people, at some companies, at least…

[T]he new measure may have more bark than bite, especially if the rules call for the executives' total compensation to fall by an average of 50 percent: the actual pay cuts for the top 25 earners at Citigroup and Bank of America could be skewed because their chief executives have already agreed to enormous reductions.

If their pay cuts are factored into the equation [...], that might give the affected companies more leeway to pay multimillion-dollar bonuses to the other 24 executives included.

And assuming the affected executives still work at these companies, which many of them do not…

At Bank of America, for instance, only 14 of the 25 highly paid executives remained by the time Feinberg announced his decision.

At American International Group, only 13 people of the top 25 were still on hand for Feinberg's decision.

On the bright side: Every minute Wall Street spends giggling at Ken Feinberg is a minute they're not developing a system for turning cat poop into tradable securities, so maybe some good will come from this after all.