Washington  - Major US financial firms will dole out a record 140 billion dollars in salaries and bonuses this year despite the financial crisis that has fuelled public anger against bankers' pay, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis Wednesday.

Salaries are set to climb 20 per cent from 2008 and even rise above Wall Street's best-ever year of 2007, when employees received 130 billion dollars in total.

This comes despite the near-collapse of the US financial sector, sparked by Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy in September 2008, which pushed the wider world economy into its worst recession since World War II.

The Wall Street Journal based its findings on the first-quarter securities filings and revenue outlooks of 23 major US financial firms, many of which have quickly returned to making profits this year and paid back billions of dollars in government bail-outs.

The US stock market is running at its highest levels of the year as the world's largest economy is set to pull out of its recession this quarter. But with unemployment near 10 per cent and climbing, Wall Street's salaries will not sit well with the average public.

Governments have charged that high bonuses and incentives for executives spurred on excessive risk-taking at financial firms and helped cause the crisis.

Many countries are in the midst of adopting sweeping regulatory reforms, including of bankers' pay. But the focus has been on changing the incentive structure to discourage risk taking, rather than imposing hard caps on executive salaries.  dpa