Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit unexpectedly resigned yesterday. He was one of just three major bank CEOs who had led their firms through the 2008 financial crisis that was still at the helm.

Pandit left having made $260 million with Citi, including his annual compensation as CEO and the money he made when he sold his hedge fund to Citi in 2007. But to hear CNBC host Maria Bartiromo tell it, Pandit quit because he hadn’t made enough money and because he was getting “bashed and bashed again by the President, by the populists”:

Let’s face it, we have an individual here who sold his hedge fund to Citi for $800 million, taking the CEO role five years ago, and then during the financial crisis agreeing to work for $1. Getting bashed and bashed and bashed again by the President, by the populists, and he probably just said to himself, “look, I’m done. If they’re not going to pay me commiserate with what some of my colleagues in banking are making, I can’t work for a dollar anymore.”

CNBC’s Jim Cramer added later, “you know what, I think people in general, they welcome any change at the banks, including our President.” Watch it:

Pandit indeed worked for $1 following the financial crisis. But he was awarded $15 million last year, despite his company’s precipitous decline. Overall, he’s been paid hundreds of millions of dollars as his company lost 88 percent of its value.

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit abruptly resigned today, leaving the helm of the bank that he guided through the financial crisis of 2008. For his five years of leading Citi, Pandit will receive compensation in the neighborhood of $260 million:

If no alterations are made to Pandit’s compensation package, Citigroup will have paid him about $261 million in the five years since he became CEO, including his personal compensation and about $165 million for buying his Old Lane Partners LP hedge fund in 2007 in a deal that led to his becoming CEO. The bank shut Old Lane soon after Pandit took the post, causing a $202 million writedown.

But while Pandit made off like a bandit, shareholders were not so lucky. Via Matt Yglesias, here’s Citigroup’s stock performance since Pandit took over:

Overall, Citi lost 88 percent of its value under Pandit. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal dinged Pandit for having the pay package that was most detached from his company’s performance, as a three-year decline of 27 percent coincided with his making $43 million. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law gave shareholders the right to hold a non-binding vote on executive compensation, and Pandit was the first bank CEO to get tagged with a vote of disapproval.

Wall Street firms are shedding jobs by the thousands, but total compensation isn’t falling. In fact, according to a new report from the New York state comptroller, compensation on Wall Street is nearing record levels, with the total rising to more than $60 billion in 2012, the New York Times reports:

The report showed that total compensation on Wall Street last year rose 4 percent, to more than $60 billion. That was higher than any total except those in 2007 and 2008 — before the financial crisis fully took its toll on pay.

The average pay package of securities industry employees in New York State was $362,950, up 16.6 percent over the last two years.

That number doesn’t take into account year-end bonuses; another report found that nearly half of Wall Street employees believe their bonuses will be larger than they were last year. The comptroller’s report found, however, that bonus pools were likely to shrink for the second consecutive year.

For the people running Wall Street’s biggest companies, pay isn’t always linked to performance. Wall Street executive pay rose more than 20 percent in 2011, even as 33 of the 50 biggest companies saw negative share returns. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, for instance, made $43 million last year even though his company’s stock price dropped 44 percent.

Over the last four quarters, big Wall Street banks have been more profitable than at any time since before the Great Recession, with the six largest banks making $63 billion. While some high-profile Wall Street firms say they’ll reduce their bonus pool, some bankers will still be pulling in seven-figure bonuses, and starting bonuses easily clear six-figures.

But one Wall Street executive is taking issue with sky-high pay. James Gorman, chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, told the Financial Times that compensation on Wall Street is “way too high,” chiding banks for increasing pay in good times and bad:

“There’s way too much capacity and compensation is way too high,” Mr Gorman said in an interview with the Financial Times. “As a shareholder I’m sort of sympathetic to the shareholder view that the industry is still overpaid.” [...]

“Comp [compensation] comes down because the amount of people in the business comes down,” said Mr Gorman. “What the Street has historically done is when revenues went up, they kept the comp-to-revenue ratio flat. They rank comp by ratio. When revenues went down, they increased the comp-to-revenue ratio because they said, ‘We might lose all our people. We have to increase it’. ”

He added: “That’s a classic Wall Street case of ‘Heads I win; tails, you lose’. The current Wall Street management is a little tougher-minded about that and shareholders are certainly tougher-minded.”

Over the last 30 years, skyrocketing Wall Street pay has contributed to the country’s increasing income inequality. And as one former Wall Street trader put it, “there’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little.” Pay for Wall Street CEOs jumped by double-digits last year according to multiple analyses.

CEO pay has increased 725 percent over three decades, while worker pay has essentially remained flat. Corporations argue that the excessive compensation is necessary to retain top talent, but a new study blows a hole in this highly-improbable theory:

It is increasingly apparent that the pay awarded to chief executives is becoming profoundly detached from not just the pay of the average worker, but also from the companies they run. Offsetting the external focus, which is so heavily relied upon today, with internal metrics and internal benchmarking may help to curb the persistent escalation. We hope that if directors are no longer constrained by notions of “competitive” pay, which are driven by the false belief that CEOs are interchangeable, they may have the space to rationalize the upward spiraling pay ratchet and deliver what is more shareholder acceptable compensation.

Company boards rely on a practice where they use loosely defined “peer groups” of supposedly similar companies to set the CEO’s compensation. In reality, few CEOs leave one company for another: Of 1,800 CEO successions between 1993-2005, less than 2 percent had held the position at a competing firm. Their skills, highly specific to the company, are not easily transferrable.

Another issue is the “peer groups” companies use is so loosely defined that it includes firms that are much larger or aren’t in the same industry, much less rivals. In other words, the CEO of IBM is unlikely to jump to AT&T, Ford or Pfizer, even though those companies’ CEOs are included in IBM’s peer group.

A recent example may include Best Buy, which offered its new CEO a three-year compensation package of $32 million, after laying off 2,400 employees this summer. A company spokeswoman defended CEO Hubert Joly’s pay as “in-line with best practice for Fortune 50 companies,” and “is squarely in the mid-range for a CEO of a company the size of Best Buy.”

“It’s a false paradox,,” study co-author Elson told the New York Times. “The peer group is based on the theory of transferability of talent. But we found that C.E.O. skills are very firm-specific. C.E.O.’s don’t move very often, but when they do, they’re flops.”

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies notes that tax breaks enjoyed by 26 of the most highly-compensated chief executive officers in the U.S. could have instead been spent to hire an estimated 211,000 elementary school teachers.

According to the report, four direct tax subsidies that corporations take advantage of to boost executive pay into the stratosphere cost taxpayers an estimated $14.4 billion per year, which is enough to hire 211,000 elementary school teachers, fund public broadcasting for more than 30 years, or provide the maximum Pell Grant to more than 2.5 million college students.

The US tax code is riddled with easily exploitable loopholes that corporations routinely employ when it comes to executive pay. A CEO’s salary is only tax deductible up to $1 million, so instead they receive other forms of compensation, like stock options or other “performance based pay,” which are exempt from the deductibility limit. That practice alone cost taxpayers $9.7 billion in 2011, says IPS:

The unlimited tax deductibility of executive pay loophole operates as a powerful subsidy for excessive compensation. The more corporations pay out in executive compensation, the less they owe in taxes. And average taxpayers wind up paying the bill. According to the Economic Policy Institute, this loophole cost American taxpayers as much as $9.7 billion in 2010.

Rewarding executives with salaries stretching into the hundreds of millions per year, and pushing the bill onto taxpayers, simply forces deeper cuts in other government services, at a time when CEO pay is already through the roof.

The Bush tax cuts, again, are set to expire at the end of the year, and President Obama has promised to veto any extension of the cuts on income in excess of $250,000. Of course, Republicans are opposed to anything but a complete extension.

In a new report, the Institute for Policy Studies shows just how unnecessary the tax breaks on high income are, noting that last year, 57 of the top 100 CEOs in the country saved more than $1 million due to the Bush tax cuts alone:

– CEOs have benefited enormously from the Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers. Last year, 57 CEOs saved more than $1 million on their personal income tax bills, thanks to these Bush-era cuts.

– The top CEO beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, James Mulva of ConocoPhillips, saved $6.7 million. Mulva cashed in more than $140 million in stock options in his last year at the energy company’s helm.

IPS added, “All the CEOs on this list certainly saved significantly more from the Bush tax cuts than the sums listed here, since they had additional income from other sources, including their investments.”

In recent decades, CEO pay has absolutely skyrocketed, leaving worker pay far behind. It would take the typical American worker 244 years to earn what the average CEO now makes in one year. Over the last 30 years, CEO pay has increased 127 times faster than worker pay. And at the same time, taxes on the rich have gone down further and further, further exacerbating already high income inequality.

The last increase in the federal minimum wage was passed into law four years ago today, but the current minimum wage falls far short of meeting the needs of the average worker. To match the buying power of the 1968 minimum wage, for instance, today’s would need to be increased to $10.55 an hour.

And yet, more than a quarter of America’s private sector workers make less than $10 an hour, according to a report released this month by the National Employment Law Project:

In 2011, more than one in four private sector jobs (26 percent) were low‐wage positions paying less than $10 per hour. These jobs, moreover, were concentrated in industries where low‐wage workers make up a substantial share – in some cases more than half – of the entire workforce.

Worse yet, the share of low-wage jobs is increasing, as five industries that are comprised primarily of low-wage workers have grown faster than total employment since the end of the Great Recession, as this NELP chart shows:

While the share of low-wage jobs continues to rise, so to do the profits of the corporations that utilize low-wage workers. Two-thirds of America’s low-wage workers are employed by corporations with more than 100 employees, and the nation’s biggest low-wage employers are faring well since the end of the recession. 92 percent were profitable last year, and 63 percent are more profitable than they were before the recession, according to the report.

And even as they employ low-wage workers, chief executives continue to rake in massive salaries, as AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe notes. At the 50 companies that employ the largest number of low-wage workers, CEOs made an average of $9.4 million — roughly 450 times more than the gross income of a full-time worker who makes $10 an hour.