Christine Hurt has an interesting take:
... the financial crisis can be framed as a “contracts crisis.” Just as perceived torts crises, which create unpalatable torts obligations for repeat players, spawned legislative efforts at tort law reform, the perceived contracts crisis has in turn inspired legislators to try to reform existing and future contracts and the law that governs them. This energized regulatory spirit in the financial sector, after decades of a more laissez-faire approach to capital markets, intersected with a pre-existing but largely stalled movement to regulate executive compensation. ...
... the solution of regulating executive compensation may not only prove ineffective in alleviating systemic risk, but it may also open the door to public intermeddling with other private contracts, even in hindsight, particularly when the losing contract party is unsympathetic. In fact, the new targets of compensation regulation may be blue-collar, middle-class and largely outside any of the institutions that participated in activities associated with the financial meltdown. For example, the next targets of the “undeserved” compensation debates may well be the unionized private employees and the public employees, both unionized and nonunionized. Overcoming any qualms that exist to interfering with negotiated contracts in the first instance may lead to an appetite to do so in the second instance.
I'm not so sure. The art of politics is to be able to claim that contracts are sacred while rewriting them at the same time. Still, it's an interesting perspective.