Bonuses: Five letters, not four

“Bonus” is not a four-letter word. You wouldn’t know it from the noise emanating from Washington and Zurich. It’s easy to see why bonuses are getting a drubbing. On one side are taxpayer bailouts of the financial industry. On the other are $18bn of payments in the US alone. It looks obscene. One US senator, Claire McCaskill, seems intent on abolishing incentive pay schemes on Wall Street altogether. In Switzerland, state-rescued UBS cut its bonus pool by 80%, after a popular outcry. The critics...