Citigroup executives have decided in their infinite wisdom to increase base salaries for many of their employees by as much as 50 percent.

The bank says the raises - which will be partially offset by a reduction in bonuses, though overall compensation packages could be higher or lower - are necessary to remain competitive ... in an environment where the official unemployment rate will soon be in the double digits no less.

It's easy and probably fair to accuse Citigroup management of being at a minimum extremely audacious and tone-deaf to the current environment. This is, after all, a financial institution that did everything in its power to run itself into the ground - egregious compensation, dubious loan-making, wanting risk management, overambitious acquisitions, questionable business line expansion.

As a result of its shoddy strategy and the crumbling economy, the company lost a whopping $27 billion in 2008.

The only reason Citigroup even exists today is because the government decided in its infinite wisdom that the company was 'too big to fail' and stepped in with capital several times - $40 billion in direct investment and another $300 billion in loan guarantees - to save it from bankruptcy.

Now the government owns a huge chunk of the company, which still apparently doesn't give it the right to have a say in determining compensation for the rank and file.

The funny thing is, Citigroup executives may be doing the right thing, although they certainly could have done a better job explaining/defending their action.

One of the reasons - though certainly not the primary one - this country and its financial institutions got into the mess it did was because compensation policies were so heavily tilted to short-term performance, encouraging all employees, even those in areas like compliance, to woefully undervalue risk.

The decreased reliance on bonuses as an assumed form of regular compensation should help mitigate that carefree behavior in the future (though it will also likely stifle innovation as employees focus more on keeping their jobs as opposed to generating outsized profits - well, you can't have everything and if i had my druthers, I'd rather our banking system be more preoccupied with stability than unnatural growth).

And while I want to scoff at Citigroup's explanation that the salary increases are necessary to “ensure its employee compensation practices are competitive," as a company spokesman put it in a Bloomberg article, it's not entirely untrue. The irony is that because the government stepped in to save Citigroup as well as dozens of other troubled banks, the market for financial services employees is not nearly as bad as it would have been. Many of Citi's competitors have already paid back the TARP money or plan to do so soon and will likely be offering better compensation packages to top employees.

You may think this is all a good thing, because the economic fallout of a collapse in our banking institutions could have been disastrous, certainly much more damaging than the destruction caused by the dislocations in the automotive industry.

I unfortunately believe for all the hundreds of billions of dollars we've spent, we've changed very little structurally, and only put off our economic day of reckoning a little while longer.

I also think this focus on compensation is mostly noise and beside the point. What the government really needs to do is start breaking up some of these institutions which we deemed necessary to save because they were 'too big to fail' and crafting regulation to limit this kind of concentration of power within the financial services industry.

Alas, if anything, mostly I've been seeing it go the other way, as stronger players in the industry snap up the weaker ones and get even bigger. Combined with the moral hazard we've perpetuated with our reliance on bailouts, that consolidation is likely a recipe for disaster.