According to Bloomberg News, Wall Street bonuses are on track to increase by 40 percent this year. But as our partner The New York Times reports, the Obama administration will order the companies that received the most aid from the bailout to slash the pay of their top earners. According to officials who spoke to the paper, seven companies will have to cut the paychecks of the 25 highest-paid executives by an average of about 90 percent from last year. More companies will have to curb special perks like country club memberships and private planes. We look at how much the government should be involved in setting private salaries with New York Times reporter Stephen Labaton; Paul Hodgson, senior researcher at The Corporate Library; and Steve Kaplan, professor of finance at the University of Chicago's School of Business.

The Obama administration has two approaches to the economy: they want to grow it, but they also want to regulate it in new ways. A turf war has developed between President Obama's Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and a number of agencies, including the Federal Reserve, whose jurisdiction he's treading on. This week financial regulators have gone to Congress to protest Geithner's proposal to create a new agency to regulate credit cards, mortgages, and consumer debt. Stephen Labaton has been reporting on this bureaucratic battle for our partner The New York Times.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner went to Capitol Hill yesterday to announce his plan to rescue the country's economy. Geithner talked about flooding the financial system with $2.5 trillion dollars, with much of that money expected to come from China. Stephen Labaton, reporter for the New York Times, wrote a front-page article about the bailout plan and Geithner's vision and he joins us now.

For more, read Stephen Labaton's article, Bailout Plan: $2.5 Trillion and a Strong U.S. Hand in today's New York Times.

Where was the Securities and Exchange Commission—the federal agency responsible for regulating Wall Street—when Bernard Madoff was allegedly pulling off a massive fraud that could leave investors with billions of dollars in losses? Experts say there were plenty of red flags that should have tipped off regulators that something was seriously amiss. Stephen Labaton, who covers regulatory issues for the New York Times, joins The Takeaway with the story.

Want more from Stephen Labaton? Read his article, "S.E.C. Image Suffers in a String of Setbacks," at the New York Times.