Lunchtime Links: Grâce à la taxe, the British government's expecting bonuses to fall 83%

The French are doing it too, Angela Merkel thinks it's charming and the rest of the world may yet follow suite, so everything's ok, right? Not necessarily if you happened to be relying on this year's bonus to pay the mortgage, school fees, alimony etc.

As has been variously pointed out, the CEBR was predicting 6bn of bonuses in the City this year. However, Alistair is only expecting to raise around 500m from The Tax, suggesting he's not expecting the bonus pool to be much larger than 1bn - a fall of more than 80%.

Fortunately, hedge fund blogger Finbar Taggit has numerous seemingly viable methods of eluding the 50% rate. These include: 5 year forgivable loans; big backdated salary increases; big benefits in kind; the sudden recollection that this year's bonus was, in fact, guaranteed.

The contrast between the "haves" and "have-nots" in big banks will be even starker than usual. (Financial Times)

The new bonus tax will raise only 0.31% of the amount the government needs to borrow next year. (Financial News)

"On a bonus of 1 million pounds, the new tax will be 500,000 pounds, National Insurance will be 130,000 pounds, and personal income tax is 400,000 pounds. This makes a total of 1.03 million pounds for the Treasury." (Bloomberg)

Darling, I love you. (Paul Krugman)

Americans want to tax the rich too. (Bloomberg)

More redundancies at Putnam Investments. (Financial News)

Piper Jaffray plans to hire about 60 investment bankers - globally. (Bloomberg)

Bonuses at Canadian banks will rise 18%. (Bloomberg)

UK banks must put aside as much as 29 billion pounds ($47.3 billion) of additional capital against their trading book under proposals published by Britain's financial regulator. (Bloomberg)

Leverage ratios, liquidity buffers, and additional capital requirements under discussion at Basel. (Alphaville)

How fat rich men get women. (The Atlantic)