Big, fat banker bonuses are back in the news again, and rightly so. The global financial crisis—now “celebrating” its first anniversary—was fed by bonus-fueled risk taking by financial-industry execs who were compensated like, and thus behaved like, hedge fund managers.

Big profits equaled big bucks, while big losses equaled slightly less big bucks. (And if you don’t believe me, ask John Thain.)

The whole bonus picture became so outrageous that one must logically conclude that bonuses are at the top of the action agenda of the world’s financial leaders, assembled in London for the Group of 20 meeting, and that the days of massive risk-encouraging bonuses are a thing of the past?

Guess again.

At the G-20 summit meeting over the weekend, the assembled finance ministers waxed rhapsodic about the evils of excessive bonuses and even, shockingly, the massive profits that some banks manage to produce even in the worst of times. Adair Turner, chairman of the British Financial Services Authority, called such profits “obscene.” In the days leading up to the meeting, British prime minister Gordon Brown signed a letter with Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel of Germany, pledging to do something about banker bonuses.

An impressive letter, to be sure, but U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner would have none of it. No Adair Turner he. Acting in his accustomed role as Wall Street’s best friend in the halls of power, he pushed the point that raising bank capital levels was a more cogent way of keeping bankers from driving us all to the abyss again. So the G-20 passed the buck to the new Financial Stability Board, which the central bankers set up in April for, apparently, the purpose of ruminating over hot potatoes like this one while the people with the power do nothing.

Bonuses are, in short, a depressing topic. But there is hope. A consulting firm called Stern Stewart says it has a solution to the bonus problem. A neatly mathematical one. The firm’s managing director, Erik Stern, wants financial firms to adopt his proprietary Relative Wealth Added model, so as to neatly align shareholder and executive interests. (There is a public interest too, as we all have learned over the past year, but that’s not in there.)

Stern told Reuters that "many managers were paid especially well because markets were rising, including those whose firms performed worse than peers. They had good fortune. Were they managers of premier league clubs, they would probably have been fired."

To set things straight, Stern would have options awards vest over much longer periods of time, so that managers are less inclined to be driven by short-term goals.