The BBC reports that EU leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday have agreed to act collectively to put pressure on the G20 to come up with a global solution on banker pay. The Corporation quotes Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeld, whose country currently holds the EU presidency, who said: 'The bonus bubble burst tonight. We have agreed to say 'enough is enough', and we need to move away from the current culture of compensation based on short-term performance'.

In the meantime, The Times reports that 45 former Barclays Capital traders have left the firm and established C12 Capital Management, which will manage some of Barclays' toxic assets.

In a sneaky bit of sleight-of-hand bookkeeping, Barclays has sold $12.3bn of toxic debt to Protium, a newly-established Cayman Islands registered company, and has funded the asset purchase by way of 10 year loan to the Cayman Islands entity. The transaction means that Barclays doesn't have to mark down the assets if they deteriorate further (although the Protium loan, of course, will remain on its books), and the bankers, (who will be paid $400m in management fees over the next 10 years by Protium), will be free from any future curbs on banker pay. Nice.

And The Wall Street Journal reports that France appears to have loosened its stance on banker pay (but only a bit). The newspaper quotes French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who said Wednesday that the government will not be proscriptive about bonuses going into the next G20 summit. Ms Lagarde said: 'We're not so narrow-minded to the point that we want a number (on bonuses). But we want something that can be nailed down to solid parameters..........something that effectively limits and frames compensation'.

Bloomberg reports that SocGen's Jerome Kerviel, the trader at the center of last year's $7bn derivatives trading scandal, has told France2 TV that restrictions on banker pay wouldn't curb a trader's appetite for risk. Traders, he says, are 'addicted' to risk. And we thought they were just 'addicted' to bonuses.

Reuters reports that Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit confirmed Thursday that he thought that $100m compensation for an employee of a company receiving government support was too much. Andrew Hall, the trader who runs Citi's profitable commodities trading unit, Phibro, is said to likely to receive up to $100m this year (if certain targets are hit). Speaking to an audience in New York, Pandit also said that Citi is considering 'transforming' Phibro from a prop trading unit to an asset manager.

Finally, Associated Press reports that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has said that bankers have yet to repent for the mistakes they made which caused the global financial and economic crisis. He also fears that financial markets professionals have simply gone back to 'business as usual'. The little devils!

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