The doubling of Lloyd Blankfein’s bonus for 2012 and the halving of Jamie Dimon’s payout was a sign of a return of the natural order of things on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs’s CEO Blankfein was rewarded for a year when the bank finally seemed to get its mojo back, while JPMorgan CEO Dimon was punished – fairly lightly – for his failure to deal with a monumental risk-management blunder in the form of the London Whale credit derivatives trading loss of over $6 billion.

Euromoney columnist Jon Macaskill takes a look at the year ahead when investment banks go back to the future.

The decision by UBS to perform elective surgery on its own investment bank can be partly attributed to pressure from bank-stock analysts. It might be premature to hail the dawning of a new age of the analysts, but a group who had become best known for astonishingly inaccurate stock forecasts and fawning attitudes to bank CEOs has at least begun to redeem itself.

Long-suffering shareholders of UBS can take comfort that JPMorgan’s bank-stock analyst Kian Abouhossein feels their pain. Abouhossein, who is consistently at or near the top of industry rankings of bank analysts, has been an owner of UBS shares while he has touted UBS as his number-one bank-stock pick in recent years and produced price forecasts well above the prevailing market value.

Goldman Sachs insiders were relieved by the dearth of damning allegations in Greg Smith’s tell-all book about his time at the firm.

Greg Smith’s memoir about his career at Goldman Sachs could have been subtitled ‘The curious incident of the dog that didn’t bark’.

The business of selling out your employer for a cash reward is still in its infancy. But the slow grinding of the wheels of regulatory justice is throwing up increasing numbers of employees who are providing evidence against employers to dodge or mitigate punishment.

The award of $104 million to UBS tax whistle-blower Bradley Birkenfeld in September showed that there is still good money to be made in banking. It just may come in the future from turning in your former colleagues and bosses to the authorities.

The credit boom is serving the real-money investment community well, but many supposedly smart-money hedge funds and investment banks are missing out on the party.

Life as an investment banker has always had its drawbacks. Colleagues try to steal your business, senior managers expect obeisance, and clients put your ideas out to tender with competitors.

The recent publication of email exchanges from 2008 between the Bank of England and the British Bankers’ Association about Libor reform cast both in a poor light.

Estimates of the impact of the Libor scandal have so far focused on potential direct costs in the form of fines and litigation expenses, tied to speculation about which investment bankers will be forced to follow Bob Diamond and Jerry del Missier of Barclays into unscheduled retirement.

The bank's chief executive Brady Dougan is under sustained attack internally and from disaffected shareholders amid financial pressure, a three-notch credit downgrade and a projected wave of job cuts.

If German credit default swaps continue to rise – pricing in rising liabilities on Berlin’s balance sheet – Deutsche Bank’s historic funding advantage will take a knock. But, for the likes of Bill Gross and John Paulson, the great sell-Germany trade has to deal with a looming ban on naked shorts and will only pay off if the cash market cracks.

The JPMorgan credit derivatives trading farce is set to extend its run. Rival market players will have plenty of tactical opportunities for profits, but a bigger question for peer-group banks is whether they will be able to win back investment banking market share that was lost to JPMorgan after 2008.

Jamie Dimon’s failure to control the traders gone wild in JPMorgan’s chief investment office has dealt a serious blow to the standing of group CFO Doug Braunstein and investment bank head Jes Staley.

As JPMorgan's losses in credit derivatives are revealed, Euromoney columnist Jon Macaskill reveals just how the CIO division worked and the positions it took - and warns that other houses on Wall Street could try to make their rivals' losses worse.

Media coverage of the staff in JPMorgan’s chief investment office turned up nuggets that ranged from the banal (credit derivatives trader Bruno Iksil has a penchant for wearing black jeans) to the comical (London head Achilles Macris had a picture of a missile on his apartment wall, in brave defiance of stereotypical assumptions about dealers).

UBS chief executive Sergio Ermotti has taken a giant step back in the latest attempt to revive the ailing firm by hiring his former Merrill Lynch colleague Andrea Orcel as co-head of investment banking.

As Greg Smith snags a $1.5 million advance for the rights to his memoirs, Euromoney columnist Jon Macaskill imagines what the former equity derivative specialist might reveal about his career at Goldman Sachs.

As Greg Smith snags a $1.5 million advance for the rights to his memoirs, Euromoney columnist Jon Macaskill imagines what the former equity derivative specialist might reveal about his career at Goldman Sachs

UBS chief executive Sergio Ermotti has taken a giant step back in the latest attempt to revive the ailing firm by hiring his former Merrill Lynch colleague Andrea Orcel as co-head of investment banking.

Ronald Reagan once joked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Wall Street traders tend to share the view that the business of profiting from capital flows works best with minimal interference, but the government in the form of the Federal Reserve recently gave the moribund market in mortgage-backed securities a big boost.

Credit Suisse maintained its reputation for bonus structure creativity when times are tough with its recent move to make payments to some staff in the form of bonds linked to its own derivatives counterparty exposure. The paper will offer healthy coupons of 5% in Swiss francs or 6.5% in dollars, but without the upside offered by the original Partner Asset Facility (as it was dubbed) from 2008, which delivered a return of 70% by giving staff exposure to toxic mortgage and high-yield debt assets that had collapsed in price but later recovered value.

David Einhorn’s £7.2 million ($11.3 million) fine by the UK’s Financial Services Authority for insider trading in Punch Taverns stock should make some hedge fund managers and investment bankers very afraid.

When David Einhorn was sanctioned by the UK’s Financial Services Authority at the end of January he was described in one newspaper profile as “self-effacing”, which was an odd phrase for a hedge fund manager who relishes the spotlight, at least by the standards of the industry.

More coals were heaped on the head of Johnny Cameron after the details in December’s FSA report on the failure of RBS revealed how little he appeared to understand the mechanics of structured credit when he was head of global banking and markets at the firm.

Banks face tough decisions on how hard they should fight to retain sales and trading market share in different sectors, as the great deleveraging drive of 2012 gets under way.

The decision by Congressman Barney Frank not to seek re-election to the US House of Representatives next year could result in an unexpected financial windfall for some employees of Goldman Sachs.

Bank of America recently issued a footnoted warning in a regulatory filing about $11.5 billion of additional collateral payments on derivatives it faces because of rating agency downgrades. At the end of September the bank was on the hook for $4.9 billion of extra collateral that it might be required to pay but had not yet posted, including $3.2 billion linked to its September 21 downgrade by Moody’s.