Goldman CEO Calls For New Pay Plan, RBS Cuts 9,000

While superstar analyst Meredith Whitney says hold onto your banking stocks and superstar investor George Soros says you best ditch ‘em, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein says the banking industry needs to rethink the way it pays its dealmakers, acknowledging that the old way of paying top finance folk was perhaps a bit "self-serving and greedy.” Perhaps indeed. The CEO—whose not-so-golden-anymore firm (but still at the top of the investment banking heap) expects to repay its TARP billions soon in order to get out of the way of further government oversight—also called for more regulation of hedge funds and private equity funds.

In other big-bank news, the Royal Bank of Scotland says after it fixes its broken windows (broken by G20 vandals last week) it’s making another 9,000 redundancies, spun by RBS CEO Stephen Hester as part of a “difficult,” “new strategy” to restore the bank to “standalone strength as soon as practicable.”

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse in the PR department for Merrill Lynch, today it was revealed that Mother Merrill was forced to pay $75 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought against it by a few former employees, and that Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich (the former presidential hopeful and good pal of the Redheaded Stranger Willie Nelson) recently wrote the SEC asking the Commission to look into whether Bank of America violated federal securities law by not revealing Merrill’s more than $3.5 billion planned bonus payments to insiders before putting the acquisition to a shareholder vote.

And finally, here’s a preview of your financial train wreck of the day. For the complete crash involving everyone’s favorite knighted crook, Sir Allen Stanford, tune in to ABC at 6:30 p.m.