In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, policymakers devised a raft of rules to make sure something similar couldn’t happen again. Some people worried about the consequences. “Has anyone bothered to study the cumulative effect of all these things?” JPMorgan Chase & Co. boss Jamie Dimon asked Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the Federal Reserve. It seems like no one had. Many of the rules didn’t perform as intended and, 15 years later, some are being reconsidered.

The latest to go, in the UK at least, is the cap on bankers’ bonuses. Introduced in 2014 as part of a Europe-wide directive, it imposed a 100% limit (or 200% with shareholder approval) on the level of discretionary compensation bankers could earn relative to their fixed pay. The thinking was that by limiting the maximum gain for any individual risk-taker, the ceiling would limit overall risk taking in the system. It didn’t take long to find a workaround. Instead of retaining staff with bonuses, banks simply paid them higher salaries.