Wednesday, President Obama will unveil a cap on executive pay for companies that receive “large amounts” of bailout money, according to the Times.

Obama and the Treasury are right to impose such a cap. It is untenable for taxpayers directly to support lavish pay for executives at government-guaranteed corporations. When the taxpayer is bearing all risk — as the taxpayer is now in much of the financial industry — the government should set limits.

The real problem here is that the government has indefinitely replaced the private sector in the financial industry.

What’s done is done.

But Obama’s Treasury should make clear that at the financial institutions for which the taxpayer is now responsible, the government’s goal is for these companies to sell off their salvageable assets to new private owners as quickly as practicable, even at fire-sale prices.

Only then can fresh companies whose executives know what they’re doing start to fix the broken financial sector.

Otherwise, we’ll be stuck for years, if not decades, with the bizarre public-private financial partnerships that we’ve created over the past 11 months.