[seebs]

I don't buy the argument that you can't deserve a bonus for exceptional work just because things have worked out badly.

We recently shipped a product almost-on-schedule. I don't think we quite made the original plan. On the other hand, we should have missed it by a month or two -- but the engineers kicked ass for a month, put in extra hours, and brought things in MUCH faster than had been expected a month or so earlier. So we got bonuses, because the outcomes were better than they would have been otherwise.

If a few hundred billion billion dollars of investments suddenly disappear from the US economy, and investment banks suddenly have less money, a lot of them are fucked. If some of them do a really good job of turning things around at lower costs than expected, recovering things that were thought to be unrecoverable, and so on, then yes, they probably deserve bonuses.

Whether these specific bonuses match that description, I cannot say, but I do not feel comfortable with the blanket assertion that none of these people can possibly deserve bonuses.