Huuuge bonuses at Barclays Capital?

Fresh from all the palpitations over potential bonuses at Goldman Sachs, a new movement is afoot to generate a little frisson around the possible size of this year's payouts at Barclays Capital.

According to The Guardian they will be big, particularly at the old Lehman business in the US, where many people are allegedly on guarantees.

Alphaville has also been stoking the Barclays bonus excitement. Last week it ran an article citing a research note from Morgan Stanley which suggests that BarCap may have had a very, very good Q2.

We have secured a copy of this research note, which shows not only that most areas of BarCap are expected to do extraordinarily well this year and next...

....but that staff costs are expected to increase substantially (across the group).

Apart from this, there appear to be two other good reasons why BarCap can be expected to pay biggish bonuses:

1) If it wants to be the premier global investment bank it will need to pay on a par with Goldman Sachs.

2) It's hiring lots of people, allegedly on quite generous guarantees, and (theoretically) will therefore need to compensate its existing staff handsomely to avoid disgruntlement.