Life out of balance, indeed. Remember, money is a bubble - push down in one place and it pops up in another. Who has less so these people have more?

NEW YORK — Executives at Wall Street’s top financial firms will probably remember this holiday season with particular fondness, as soaring profits cascade down to traders and bankers in the form of multimillion-dollar bonuses.

This year, four of the top five brokerage houses have posted record earnings, paced by Goldman Sachs, where income jumped 68% over 2005.

Even Morgan Stanley, where an ugly internal putsch resulted in the ouster of an autocratic CEO last year, bounced back smartly in 2006, announcing a 51% rise in earnings Tuesday. [...]

All told, this year’s bonus pool for Wall Street executives hit $23.9 billion, the New York State Comptroller’s office estimates. That’s a 17% jump from last year’s bonus pool of $20.5 billion, and it works out to an average bonus of $137,580 for every person employed in the financial services industry.

But few will receive bonus checks for the average amount. Instead, the top executives at these firms and their most successful traders will get bonuses north of $10 million each, while the underperformers and support staff will receive far less than the average. [...]

To a great extent, Wall Street’s biggest banks are prospering because they’ve all expanded beyond their traditional businesses into the trading of complex financial products. Also, even though the market for initial public offerings has cooled in the USA, it’s strong overseas, and Wall Street firms have competed aggressively around the world for new issues of stock and debt.

And yet, some observers doubt that the big firms can keep breaking one earnings record after another.

“There’s a disconnect between the economy and the financial system,” says Richard Bove, who tracks the financial services industry for Punk Ziegel. “Income has to be generated somewhere. The financial sector has taken on a life of its own not connected to what’s going on in the economy and, ultimately, that has to be addressed.”