Is it right to bash the bankers?
As Labour holds its party conference in Brighton, the chancellor will tell delegates new laws to scrap automatic bonuses will be brought in within weeks - and has called on the industry to sort itself out too. But is the government right to attack what it'll calls bankers' 'greed and recklessness' or are bankers an easy scapegoat to deflect attention from the country's wider economic problems?
Are you still angry with the amount of taxpayers' cash the banks have? Was it bonuses that caused the recession? If you work at a bank how do you feel?
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Our wider economic problems can be traced back to the lax manner in which the financial sector has been regulated (i.e. not much at all). Bonuses are only part of this and it seems strange to focus on such as small part of the problem. Wider regulation is needed and the government needs to stop being so scared to get tough - it runs the country, not the bankers, so it should act like it!
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Bash the bankers...yes and no...yes, they need to be curtailed but not by the state, by the non-exec shareholders...no...government, most especially Brown/Balls need to hold up their hands and admit their regulatory design failures!
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of course its right to bash the bankers they are the root cause of all the problems in this country people loseing there jobs and pensions sadly its allways the people at the bottom of the food chain that struggle to make ends meet liveing on benefits trying to bring there kids up and put food on the table while the fat cats the rich and middle class folk liveing in there rich ghettos are never affected by hard times people face in poverty on a daily basis its allways the poor and working class who suffer most yet you have media organisations and the puppet presenters who manipulate the truth
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I live in New York and have known a lot of bankers. The culture has become corrupted with unbelievable greed and smugness over time. If British bankers are anything like their New York cousins, limiting their bonuses is very sensible. Since they are architects of a lot of the mess we are now in, it is hardly scapegoating them.
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I don’t work for either the Banking sector or the Public Sector. I don’t get a bonus or a pension. It seems to me that this Gov’t very much enjoyed taking huge revenues from the banking sector over the last 15 years for their social engineering. As a tax-payer I am more concerned about the immoral huge pensions in the public sector, than I am banker’s bonuses, bet these add up to more than bankers bonuses. To me this is just Gov’t spin to deflect attention from their dreadful management with our money; the sheep at the conference love a good excuse and a nice hanging.
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That man on the phone who says that someone paid £1m a year pays half a million in tax is wrong. They don't pay anywhere near that much tax - there are tax dodges etc etc which means they pay less.
If they want to leave, let them. There are only a few individuals who can up sticks and leave in a tax-enduced huff.
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I am a former police officer who specialised in the investigation of money laundering and fraud. After 18 years I embarked on a career in banking. Earlier this year I issued tribunal proceedings against my employer for bullying and detrimental treatment connected to my legally obligated whistleblowing activities. I was on verge of issuing further proceedings when the bank and I mediated a settlement.
As a police officer my bonus was this - when I woke up in the morning and my wife and children were safe and well - that was my bonus, I wanted for nothing else.
In banking I feel as though it is run on greed - money controls everything, especially people. It was when some within my bank realised that the money control did not apply to me that they saw a problem.
I was an anti-money laundering compliance officer, it was my role to implement policies, procedures, systems and controls to prevent money laundering. The law demands that any suspicions of money laundering be reported to the authorities. I complied with the law, I made enemies within the bank by doing so.
Put simply the control environment - in particular should never have been drawn into the bonus culture, they need to sit outside of it, such that their actions have no impact upon potential personal bonuses. They need to do the right thing for the right reasons. When the controls/compliance are drawn into the bonus culture, there are too many reasons, all of them dollars, pounds and euros as to why they should give front line money making colleagues what their hearts want, as against what their heads need.
Bring on the changes - that are appropriate, proportionate and effective that allow for adequate reward for industry, effort and success.
Put simply within banks, all control environments should not be paid any bonuses whatsoever, this way they can remain independent and objective.
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The entire financial sector clearly needs heavily regulating. It has recently illustrated the epitomy of the worst extremes of nasty, greedy capitalism. It is an industry that creates nothing .... simply creating and destroying money and wealth, mostly from speculation. It angers me that stock brokers in London can, based on rumour and speculation, hike up, or decimate the value of the labour of coffee pickers in Bolivia. It is any wonder that those farmer turn to growing opium poppies?
Usary, use to be the charging of any interest on borrowed funds, and was forbidden in religious law (I believe it still is for moslems, but is circumvented, somehow). Now, usary is the charging of unreasonable interest, this hints at the ethics.
Isn't banking simply about holding and lending money? Now we have a plethora of derivatives, options, futures on options, options on futures, capital additive ratios, quantitative easing, swaps, forward rate agreements, barriers, CPPIs, cliquets, compound options, loopback, variance swaps, etc, etc, etc.
It requires a degree in financial terms to even understand what is going on. What hope for transparency?? You tell me. It all simply conspires to disenfranchise the ill education and middle to lower earners, in favour of a few unscrupulous greedy people at the top. Banking is a very useful function. Let's simply simplify the entire sector, then those with no scruples will have to go elsewhere, in order to make their ill gotten gains.
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Fingersgreen, i am the man that was on the radio. I was keeping it simple to try and get my point accross. Even if they only pay £250,00 a years in tax or there £1m, that is still a lot more tax than most of us will pay in 20 years of work. If they decide to go elsewhere because of bonus restrictions or higher taxes, it won't take many people in that pay bracket to leave before we all notice, starting with the ordinary city workers on £20-30k a year who will no longer have a job and then will no longer be paying taxes.
This situation has to be looked at holistically. Whether we like it or not, we need these people for now. In the future, when times are better we need to attempt to build an economy that is more balanced, with tax revenue coming from a broader range of economic activities. For the time being, however, we need every penny to get out of the hole we are in. A hole, i might add, that various Governments have to share the blame for through their lack of action in allowing of untested products and unstable funding strategies to flourish. This Govt is being disingenuous in the extreme when it tries to heap all the blame on everyone else. There is bame on all sides and David Buik's point about the bag of sweets is a good one.
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Why can we not change the law and take back the millions sitting in their accounts and put back into our public services. What is this nonsense about losing our good people? These are incompetent greedy people who have got us into a mess - let some other country have them! Are we suggesting that we are all so stupid in this country that we don't have any other people to step in their shoes?
Take back the bonuses from these moraly corrupt INVESTMENT bankers for the last few years - should they not have prison sentences for what they have done never mind more bonuses.
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the bankers are a greedy lot but so are most of us we took the cheap loans credit cards we let are goverments sell all are assetts ie bp british gas water and many others cheaply and then cashed the share. we have put all are eggs in one basket and made alot of money we the british people and goverment should look in the mirror and ask why we are so reliant on banks to keep us afloat ,and why there was no support for the industries that made profits but went abroad to other coutries
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Dancingvalerie is right that incompetent and greedy people got us into this mess. An incompetent Chancellor failed to oversee the creation of a proper regulatory framework when he moved market regulation from the Bank of England to the FSA. This was because he was eager to get his greedy hands on the enormous taxes revenues that would be generated by lightly regulated markets.
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In centuries gone by, high earners usually engaged in som philanthropic activity - maybe that's how the banksers should assuage themeselves of their guilt?
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I firmly believe that Parties don't win elections, they lose them.
The Labour party were only elected because they weren't the Conservatives, the Conservatives will win next year because they aren't the Labour party.
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We don't need to bash the bankers. We simply need to define what people have to do to achieve to earn a bonus and make public the information on who earns bonuses and why they qualify.
Bonuses for senior staff should always be made public so that the correct tax is paid.
Bonuses should be frozen until the deals complete and the bonus recalculated if they are not as profitable as expected.
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I am listening to Gloria this morning and Labour ministers are saying they need to 'engage with people' to discuss areas of concern etc! Why have they not removed undemocratic, unelected very highly paid invisibles removing any chance we have of influencing any decision the government feel they wish to lever through without the 'bother' of any sort of debate.
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I have been a labour voter all my life (62yrs.) and have never heard these so-called 'politicians', who are supposedly our representatives follow the tired old party line. I will vote Liberal next May to give them a chance.
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Bashing the bakers is an attempt to keep the Governments role in this bust out of the publics attention.
Government couldn't make to books balance in a boom had to borrow.
Our trade deficit collapsed into the red £80 billion in the red, with a balance of payments deficit of £50billion.
Our savings rates collapsed (needing foreign funds to keep our binge economy afloat).
We have had more personal borrowing than any other country, EVER!
Our pensions were wrecked.
Our property bubble was in excess of that in the US’s.
We lost productive jobs, one million of them in the manufacturing sector.
The Public sector ballooned.
All this and more contributed to the bust and all this was the Governments responsibility.
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Yes, beachball64, maybe the 'incompetent' chancellor did fail to oversee regulation, and maybe (certainly, in my opinion) we have relied too much on a London-based service industry for the country's economic welfare for far to long (at least since Thatcher). However, who was lobbying them? No-one? How much of the behind the scenes lobbying do we see? Politicians have not been running our economy (and quite likely many others) for years; big business has.
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Although banking plays an integral function within the capitalist system they do in fact create no actual wealth on their own. They along with all the other financial institutions through various channels simply exploit wealth created by the process of labour.
The bonuses bankers receive are similar to the massive expenses and allowances MP's receive. They are a bribe to ensure nobody rocks the boat and to ensure the frenetic turbulant neoliberal 'free enterprise' system works as effectively as possible in the eyes of the general lay public the majority of whom have no alternative but to resign the arrangement of their own domestic financial affairs to this system.
Consequently 'bashing' the banks alone is a pointless exercise because their practices which we're told created the financial mess in the first place were in fact synptomatic of the decayed system as a whole. The massive lending and borrowing of credit to firms and individuals was all rubber stamped by mainstream politicians and economic gurus because it covered up the lack of profitibility and low growth that resulted from thirty odd years of unchallenged neoliberalism by both Tory and New Labour governments. Now of course to cover their economic crimes yet again they've fully endorsed cheating on their own system by using public money to the tune of over £trillion to bail the system out to deter the public from comprehending the full magntude of the failure!
If anything is going to be bashed therefore its got to be capitalism in general along with all the global trade and military wars it creates that could lead to another world war!
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It's funny that people seem to be divided into selfish and non-selfish groups. There's a report on New Scientist today about how Earth will be when humans have died out or there is massive global warming. This has been caused by the greed of oilmen. It seems bankers can wipe out our economy, but oilmen could wipe out us!
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Of course it wasn't bonuses that caused the recession.
They may not have helped, but no more than that. The main problem is that banks only exist to make money, they used to do this by speculating with equity, but now they are forced to make it by extracting as much from us as they can. Banks should exist as a servant to the people and not as the task master. There should be tougher regulation as using an dealing with bacnks is no longer a luxury it is a necessity. At the moment the lowest fixed rate mortgage I can find is 3% above base rate.
It is a disgrace
Iva
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