Citigroup (C) CEO Vikram Pandit admitted what most people already believe. Paying an individual banker $100 million in the current climate is not responsible or right.

According to Reuters, when asked if $100 million was too much money for a Citigroup employee to earn given the government support the bank has received, Pandit said, “Yes.”

But, is it too much, or is it simply a fair wage for a job well-done?

Andrew Hall, who runs Citi’s energy trading operation Phibro, has made the bank hundreds of millions of dollars over the last few years, based on most accounts of the operation’s earnings. Without these earnings, Citi’s total profits would have been worse, and, in the quarters when it lost money its losses would have been larger.

Hall is a classic example of pay for performance. The government and the public look at Hall as a monster created by a system driven by greed, but those concerns are founded on the compensation of bankers who lost their firms large sums of money.

The current climate has caused a call to limit the pay of all bankers and allow the government to “claw back” compensation of financial executives who perform well in the short term but hurt their companies in the long term. That set of rules may eventually apply to Hall, but, even if they were in effect over the last few years, Hall would not have faced a “claw back”. He has done too well over an extended period of time.

Wall St.’s biggest producers should be left alone as long as they remain Wall St.’s biggest producers.

Douglas A. McIntrye

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