WASHINGTON, Sept 28, 2008 (AFP) - Democratic leaders of Congress described Sunday's draft agreement on a bailout plan for moribund financial institutions as a vast improvement over the initial proposal from the White House and a clear answer to excessive greed on Wall Street.

'Working in a bipartisan way, we sent a message to Wall Street: The party is over,' House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi told a press conference after the 106-page draft legislation was hammered out ahead of votes this week in the House of Representatives and Senate.

'The era of golden parachutes for high flying Wall Street operators is over,' Pelosi said mentioning clauses in the agreement that limit compensation payments for company executives and deal with issues of accountability.

'No longer will the US taxpayer bail out the recklessness of Wall Street. And that's the news that this legislation brings,' Pelosi said after deeming the President George W. Bush's initial 700 billion dollar bailout proposal as lacking safeguards for taxpayers.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the original proposal of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would have given him 'unfettered discretion ... to basically do anything he wanted to do with 700 billion.'

'It's fair to say that the administration's initial proposal was a non-starter. They wanted a blank check and we couldn't give them one,' he added.

Reid said the agreement he and other lawmakers hammered out 'will not be perfect (but) will help to stabilize our economy and protect American workers.'

House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank, another negotiator, said the agreement marked 'the first time in the history of the United States that anything has been done by Congress to curtail excessive CEO compensation.'

He underscored that the agreement included guarantees against losses to the taxpayer in the bailout process.

'At the end of five years, the president must send us an accounting and if there's a short fall, the president must send us a proposal to collect that short fall -- not all in one year, a reasonable period -- from the institutions and industries that benefited,' Frank said.

He said the cause of the financial debacle 'is reckless deregulation by too many people.'

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said 'this is a day that none of us should celebrate ... in many ways because we're having to grapple with a problem that was avoidable and preventable.

'It was not a natural phenomenon. This was not a hurricane or a tornado that came through. An act of God. This occurred because of the failure to discipline, failure to enforce, failure to be on the street regulating an environment that should have been far more policed than it was.'

He said the bailout proposal Bush 'sent us a week ago yesterday had a life span of about an hour.'