Where was the rainy day money?

I actually liked Blair, but he and Gordon Brown were no better than my 8 year old with his pocket money burning a hole in his pocket. Spend spend spend!

In which case, you have now suggested that, unless a newspaper editor is also "a university professor conducting empirical research", no media reports or content can ever be taken as anything other than "someone's opinion".

It would mean, for instance, that no newspaper ever published anything that was not opinion.

Which is quite clearly errant nonsense – and amusingly sees you destroy your own pretence that editorials constitute evidence.

As a little exercise, perhaps The Video Ref (or anyone else, for that matter) can analyse [url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/9911912/Food-watchdog-to-ask-shoppers-how-much-horse-is-acceptable.htmlthis report[/url from the [iTelegraph[/i and explain which bits of it are mere opinion, given that political correspondent Peter Dominiczak is not also "a university professor conducting empirical research".

I can see that banks will want to reward and encourage those who make squillions in profit for the banks by their activities.
To my mind the issue is not about bonuses per se, but about the giving of bonuses as reward for risky dealing.

When I wirked for the NFC we had a bonus scheme that was based on departmental profits and paid 1/4ly, not in cash but in shares. We had an internal invoice system known as "Comp 23" and the simplest way of ensuring you hit the bonus target in any particular 1/4 was to issue a Comp 23 on the final day of that 1/4 and then issue a credit the following day. Of course it meant we then started the next 1/4 in a negative balance but that could always be made up, or seldomly meant we might miss bonus that 1/4.

The banks simply seem to have taken that to a stratospheric level.

How do you de-link the two? The riskier the trade the bigger the profit (if it comes off) so the higher the bonus.

How about a return to a simple salaried pay structure where the best traders / bankers are rewarded with a high basic salary in return for trading consistently and profitably? Pay rises (if any) to be made in relation to how the [ibank[/i does overall not how individuals do in terms of profit that can be laid solely at their feet. Given they will be on high salaries anyway that should be reward enough for whatever profit they contribute.

All these stupidly high bonus do is reward a select few out of many thousands of employees and encourage the exact opposite of any kind of collective responsibility and sense of company identity. The few can milk the cash cow for a few years, walk away and hang the consequences. So IMO bonuses are just another symptom of the short term-ism that pervades society, politics and business these days. They need to be done away with completely IMO.