This year, the Wall Street bonus must die so that the bonus can live again.

Goldman Sachs is offering up martyrs to the year-end bonus season, recognizing that the public is not in any mood to read about huge multimillion-dollar paydays at a time when the economy is in trouble and Wall Street is being bailed out by the federal government.

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's chief executive, and six other top executives have asked the compensation committee of Goldman's board that they not receive bonuses this year. And the committee has agreed.

"They believe it's the right thing to do," a Goldman spokesman, Lucas van Praag, told the New York Times. "We can't ignore the fact that we are part of an industry that's associated with ongoing economic distress."

Goldman is far more savvy about its public image than American International Group, which seems baffled about why lawmakers are making so much noise about putting up independent agents at fancy resorts or paying failed executives huge exit packages.

The move by Goldman's "Munificent Seven" will certainly put pressure on other Wall Street firms to follow suit, Morgan Stanley in particular. John Mack, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, gave up his 2007 bonus. Executives at UBS and Deutsche Bank have already announced they will forgo 2008 bonuses.

The political scrutiny of Wall Street bonuses, meanwhile, is growing. The attorney general of New York, Andrew Cuomo, last month sent letters to nine banks that have received investments from the Treasury warning that bonus payments may be illegal under New York State law. Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, has also pledged to look at Wall Street pay.

Yet little is changing on pay other than a recognition that this year is different. Goldman and Morgan Stanley may have transformed themselves into bank holding companies, but there is still competition among those firms and hedge funds and others for top traders and bankers.

The calculus for talent remains he same: Make huge returns and you will be showered with wealth that year; make big losses and you can pack up you desk and leave.

Is there an alternative rewards system on the horizon? One that uses longer time frames than a fiscal year? Or one involving clawbacks when the next year is horrible? Not much chance of that. In 2010, Wall Street could be back to the same dice table.

The Munificent Seven will receive the base salary for Goldman executives who are "partner managing director" or above: $600,000. That level of pay for the C.E.O. of the leading Wall Street firm is not going to be sustainable for very long. In 2007, Blankfein made $68.5 million. For the entire firm, Goldman paid out $20.2 billion in compensation and bonuses last year.

Jeffrey Goldfarb on Breakingviews.com is more optimistic. "The heads-I-win-tails-you-lose bonus structure looks more anachronistic than ever," he says. The moves announced by Goldman and by European banks "are closer to the cultural revolution that banking compensation urgently needs."