From today's Wall Street Journal, triumphantly showing that bone-dry irony is no longer (if it ever was) a skill peculiar to the British:

Merrill Lynch & Co. chief John Thain has suggested to directors that he get a 2008 bonus of as much as $10 million...
Merrill has suffered net losses of $11.67 billion this year and is about to complete its acquisition by Bank of America Corp. later this month. On Friday, shareholders of both companies separately approved the deal. Mr. Thain has said he deserves a bonus because he helped avert what could have been a much larger crisis at the firm, say people familiar with his thinking...

It would be interesting to know exactly what this much larger crisis would have been. If $10 million worth of John Thainery was only enough to dilute it to "massive unprecedented losses and the extinction of Merrill Lynch as an independent bank", how much worse would things have got without him? Plague? Flood? The bank's headquarters taken over by werewolves?

Now, it's true that Thain shouldn't take all or even most of the blame for Merrill's collapse - he only came on board a year ago, by which time much of the damage had already been done. But absence of blame is not evidence of merit...