http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12  /09/darling-i-love-you/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jun  /16/past.russia

By Trotskyite do you mean “Icepick-and-shovel-ready Communist”?

And I thought deficits were caused by spending exceeding revenue. Silly me.

Note to Felix — throwing around the word “plutocrat” as you’ve been wont to do lately is reminiscent of the Trotskyites responsible for the “Starve the Banksters” flyers that have taken up residence on telephone poles all over my neighborhood.

Well, sort of. There’s something of a fallacy of composition here, and something else reminiscent of the mistake in saying “the price of imported oil has gone up, therefore we would be better off closing our borders to oil imports”, but that’s not actually the comment I wanted to make here.

I think the strategic equilibrium here for what is likely to be believed to be a bonus tax with a low probability of recurrence in the near future might be for the banks to wink at traders and say, “we’ll use some of the built-up equity to give even bigger bonuses next year”, in which case you do more to empower the banks vis-a-vis the employees than anything. Not that that’s a terrible thing, either, but you’ll probably see some degree of time-shifting, and some degree of lesser regarded employees ultimately taking more of the brunt of this than the employees the banks really want to keep.