Banks from Goldman Sachs to Wells Fargo have been disclosing what they're planning to pay the chief executives for the work they did in 2020.

Top of the heap this year is Morgan Stanley's James Gorman.

He gets a $33 million package, a $6 million raise on 2019.

Close behind him is JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who's in line for a 31.

$5 million payout in the usual mix of cash and shares, plus, of course, unlimited use of the private jet.

Some banks can argue they did better in 2020 and the year before.

Morgan Stanley is definitely one of those.

But what works on the upside should also work in reverse on the downside.

And it doesn't always.

Wells Fargo's profit collapsed in 2020.

So did its share price, but boss Charlie Sharp got just 13% less than he would have done the year before.

Meanwhile, to bank bosses David Solomon at Goldman Sachs and Mike Corbett, the now retired CEO of Citigroup, took big pay cuts but only because their banks had behaved badly, not because of the pandemic or their performance.

Now shareholders will get to vote on these packages in the coming months.

They'll almost certainly approve them because they always do.

But politicians in D.

C and taxpayers may not be so relaxed.

Most of these big bank CEOs now earn 250 times or more what they're median employee does.

That was hard to justify in good times.

It's even harder to justify in these times.