If the Neanderthals, those beetle-browed rivals to Home Sapiens somewhere back in the last ice age, had introduced an HR hire-and-fire strategy, then it would have surely looked something like the one UBS has just introduced for its workforce.

For UBS’s wealth management business has apparently introduced a rule to allow the recruitment of only one back-office employee if five are leaving.

When it comes to private bankers at the client coal-face, it is a little more, er.... liberal; one banker can be hired for every two that depart.

This seems to have all the finesse of painfully chipping out flint knives in...