They include paying the bonus through financial derivatives called 'contracts for difference'.

Instead of building bridges, skyscrapers or spacecraft, they had constructed complex financial derivatives.

For three decades we have relied on the financial account — direct and portfolio investment and, perhaps scarily, financial derivatives — to keep our heads above water.

The banking system remains as unreconstructed as before the crisis, and still teeters on an inverted pyramid of financial derivatives.

Straightforward financial derivatives had the virtue of being easily understood.