Three prominent financial executives faced questioning from a House committee on Friday about the huge paydays that they earned from the subprime mortgage boom, even as their companies have lost billions of dollars and thousands of borrowers have lost their homes.

The questioning mainly fell along party lines, with Republicans apologizing for hauling such distinguished corporate officials before the panel, and Democrats questioning everything from the income gap in America to the particular bonuses, stock sales and compensation the executives were awarded.

Two of the three lost their jobs last fall after the collapse of the subprime market -- E. Stanley O'Neal, Merrill Lynch's chairman and chief executive, and Charles O. Prince III, his counterpart at Citigroup -- but left with sizable pay packages. The other, Angelo R. Mozilo, the founder and chief executive of Countrywide Financial, presided over the demise of a once high-flying company that is now being acquired by Bank of America.

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"There seem to be two economic realities operating in our country today," Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, the committee chairman, said as the hearing opened Friday morning. "Most Americans live in a world where economic security is precarious and there are real economic consequences for failure. But our nation's top executives seem to live by a different set of rules."

The question before the committee, he said, was this: "When companies fail to perform, should they give millions of dollars to their senior executives?"

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The hearing shed some light on how Wall Street's compensation philosophy may have contributed to the mortgage boom. Corporate boards and compensation committees agreed to lucrative bonus plans that gave their leaders strong incentives to take big risks. Executives aggressively pushed their companies into lucrative businesses, like underwriting subprime mortgages and packaging the loans into complex securities. Then, as the housing and credit markets plummeted, those profits turned into enormous losses for shareholders. Wall Street's top executives still kept their pay.

"With executive compensation you get what you pay for and you pay for what you get," Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, an independent research firm specializing in corporate governance, said in testimony prepared for the hearing. "If you make compensation all upside and no downside, that will affect the executives assessment of risk. It will make it clear to him that he can easily offload the risk onto shareholders. It's heads they win, tails we lose."