The late Eddie George was very fond of a little joke that went as follows. “There are three types of bankers: those that can count, and those that can't.”
Sometimes jokes capture profound truths. In all the fuss about bank bonuses, we have heard about labour market “realities” (from the bankers), and moral and political philosophy (from everybody else). We need to think more about simple arithmetic.
All business people know that you can carry on for a while if you make no profits, but that if you run out of cash you are toast. Bankers, as providers of cash to others, understand this well. They just do not believe it applies to their own business.