So far the U.S. has committed $12.8 trillion to bailing out Wall Street. Does this mean that Wall Street CEOs made mistakes? Apparently not. Because if it did, the Wall Streeters who cost taxpayers all that loot would be out of their jobs.

A few have moved on -- consider Merrill Lynch's former CEO Stan O'Neal, who, after leaving the investment bank with a then-record $2.24 billion loss, received a "kick in the rear" amounting to a $161 million retirement package. (O'Neal is just one of the Harvard MBAs whose destruction of the global economy is prompting some navel gazing at HBS.)

Most, though, are still at their desks, gamely calling the shots. Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner suggested it could be time for that to change.

A few weeks ago I appeared on CNBC's Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo to discuss executive pay. One interesting point in the interview was when Ms. Bartiromo argued that it would be difficult to get good people to run big banks if their pay was limited because Wall Streeters are motivated primarily by money. I suggested that if that were true, then you would never see a former CEO of Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE: GS) take the enormous pay cut required to become Treasury Secretary.

I am not sure what motivates Wall Streeters to take those pay cuts. But today, another prominent one -- Steve Rattner with whom I worked in the 2004 presidential campaign -- announced he is leaving his private equity firm, Quadrangle Group, and shipping off to Washington to work as Counselor to the Secretary (of the Treasury).

Steve Rattner -- a major Democratic party fundraiser who heads the investment firm Quadrangle Group is the leading candidate for a position that does not formally -- and should never in my view -- exist. That is, Rattner for Car Czar. The Car Czar's job -- if Congress creates it -- will fix the U.S. automobile industry by using the threat of throwing the companies into bankruptcy to force economic "haircuts" on labor unions, dealers, bondholders and others.

I worked with Rattner in the Kerry presidential campaign and hold him in high regard. He worked to raise money for Hillary Clinton and when she did not win the nomination Rattner raised $100,000 for Barack Obama. And Rattner does not just serve Democrats -- reportedly he is managing independent New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's $13 billion fortune. I find that feat to be a remarkable testimony to Rattner's investment acumen.

Nevertheless, I think it would be better to find a different way to use Rattner's talents. If the Car Czar position does get created, it should go to an individual with demonstrated experience turning around large organizations in deep trouble. The person who comes to mind is Louis Gerstner who fixed International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM). Gerstner is not a car guy but he knows how to fix a big organization and could bring in automotive expertise as needed.

Rattner would be an asset to Obama's administration, but if there must be a Car Czar -- find a better fit.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College. His eighth book is You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing. He has no financial interest in IBM securities.

Fortune and BusinessWeek are piling on the story of Harbinger Capital Partners, a $19 billion hedge fund, seeking to take over the New York Times (NYSE: NYT). Harbinger now owns 19% of its Class A shares. Of course, Harbinger is not the only threat to management of the Times -- News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) Rupert Murdoch is doing his part as well. Will Steve Rattner, a long-time friend of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Managing Principal of Quadrangle Group, come to the rescue and take the Times private?

In play here are Phillip Falcone, a Harbinger partner who made $1.7 billion last year, and the quaint idea of protecting a media company's founding family by maintaining two classes of stock: Class A for the public to make insiders liquid and Class B for the insiders. Murdoch and Sulzberger enjoy protection for their family dynasties thanks to that two-tiered structure.

Falcone thinks that the Times is leaving huge amounts of money on the table by not "monetizing" all the comments on its stories. What sparked this idea was a January opinion piece by Caroline Kennedy comparing Barack Obama with her father, President John F. Kennedy. There were only a few comments about the article on the newspaper's Web site, nytimes.com, but there were hundreds on Huffington Post and Digg.com. BusinessWeek quotes Scott Galloway, founder of hedge fund Firebrand Partners and Falcone friend who said: "We came to the collective conclusion that there was so much upside in terms of billions of pages the paper wasn't monetizing. He [Falcone] never looked back."

Back in the 1980s, private equity maestro Ted Forstmann railed against the use of Mike Milken's junk bonds. He thought they were too risky and that the markets would eventually implode. He even wrote op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only) about this. And, yes, he was eventually proved right.

Interesting enough, there's a piece in this week's WSJ that provides some warning bells for the current state of private equity. The author is Steven Rattner, who is the managing principal of Quadrangle Group LLC.

Like Forstmann, Rattner is very concerned about the high degree of leverage in Wall Street's dealmaking.

He points to the small yield spreads on junk bonds, the subprime meltdown, and easy terms (known as "covenant light" loans).

What's more, keep in mind that it's fairly common for private equity firms to pay out huge dividends so as to magnify returns. Of course, this means more and more debt.

Basically, the credit markets are not pricing risk properly. So, when things start to go sidewise, it could be a big shock to the financial system.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.