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gbjbaanb

Listed below are comments made by gbjbaanb between Thursday, 16th October 2008 and Friday, 4th September 2009.

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Can governments squeeze bankers' pay? 10:48am on 04 Sep 2009 "But is it the sheer magnitude of the rewards that's wrong - their contribution to the growing inequality of our societies?"

Yes, I'd say it is. I heard the Today programme about super-head teachers being paid £200k (up from £120k) and thought that you don't need to "pay the best to attract the best" as all talented people would do the job for a normal rate (and infact most do already without any need for fanfare - just look at those schools that do not need to be rescued, their heads are doing a great job without superspecial rewards). So the real case against those who need to be paid such large amounts is that they are only in it for the money, not the job itself.

This is shown by the bankers who demand such large bonuses just for turning up for work, if they were motivated to run things properly, the pay would be secondary to them. Similarly for failing chief executives (eg Royston Hoggarth left BT after failing their Global Services division with a huge salary and an even bigger payoff, obviously he was there to make a difference to BT, shareholders and employees and not just to trouser the cash. Too bad that isn't how it turned out).

I heard somewhere that schoolkids were interviewed about what they wanted to be when they grew up - years back you'd have heard "train driver", "astronaut" etc. Today 90% of their ambition was to "win the lottery". Society has crumbled away from doing a decent job, hardwork for the sake of it, and been replaced with get-rich-quick. Its no wonder the economy has failed, the housing market is destroyed and everyone is depressed.

We need to get rid of this evil attitude.
Who'll be shot when banks misbehave? 11:50am on 31 Jul 2009 "you've got to pay the best to attract the best" is an often-repeated phrase by those giving out these sums, unfortunately paying the best simply means you attract the worst kind of money-grubbing wideboys. If you paid a 'normal' rate, you'd attract people who wanted the job because of the job, paying too much only attracts those interested solely in their pay cheque.

The vast majority of company directors work happily without ripping their staff, customers and shareholders off, and no-one notices them. that's generally because they're quietly getting on with doing their jobs effectively.

Unlike these bankers.
Why bankers aren't worth it 10:33am on 03 Jul 2009 "how to re-introduce moral hazard into banking, how to persuade bank chief executives that they'll really suffer if they place reckless bets that go wrong."

that's easy - jail time and asset forfeiture for the fraudulent b*****ds. if you ban the making of those bets in the first place, anyone who does screw up by making them will be subject to the penalties.

Of course, a better system of regulation by shareholders - perhaps abstentions from voting should count as an abstention rather than an automatic vote in favour of the board. Also, we could try putting some focus on the big shareholders to make sure they work in the interest of themselves. During the boom they had a very hands-off approach, and as they hold the vast majority of shares, no-one else effectively has a say in how the company is managed.

Mind you, like at Shell, even if the board is voted against by shareholders, they just ignore them anyway. The whole system is pretty broken.
A browser-free Windows 7 2:17pm on 29 Jun 2009 ach, all the people who think its fine for MS to do what they like are forgetting something important:

before Firefox arrived and became very popular, we all had to use IE6. IE6 was notorious for being rubbish, and had not been updated with the features we now take for granted in browsers (security, tabs! lots of addons). That is the state of play if you do not have effective competition. I want to be able to choose the browser that I feel is the best - this persuades all companies to make better browsers. If there is only 1 choice, the one that's bundled with the OS 'to make my life easier' then I get stuck with a sub-standard choice.

The same can apply to all the other products MS has bundled with its OS. We don't get true innovation except where they think they have to compete with someone offering something similar. If VMware hadn't offered its virtualisation software for free, Microsoft wouldn't have made its version for free either - competition made a huge difference there and the consumer won. The same applies to backup software, and practically everything else.

The real trouble with Microsoft is that as soon as it sees a company selling a product, it copies it and effectively crushes that competition. It wants us to use MS-only software and completely dominate the software marketplace. If Microsoft just made the OS, and let other companies make software to run on top, then things would surely be better for all us consumers.
The anger out there 1:30pm on 10 Feb 2009 Great - they said that Gaza elected Hamas because the previous government couldn't achieve the ordinary municipal duties expected of it - and now in the UK similarly the BNP are seen as the 'rescuers' of the common man.

It'll end it tears, the last economic crisis ended in the Nazi party and WW2. I'm not looking forward to the next 10 years.
After the fog...? 09:51am on 29 Jan 2009 Maybe we will get capitalism. At the moment we have a very poor version - all the people playing with money are those who don't have any, they use other people's.

So, if they succeed they get paid big. If they fail, they get paid big. If they put it under the mattress, they'd probably get paid big.

For a capitalist system to work, the rewards need to be better tied to the risks, then we'd see the fund managers and institutional investors working for their 'customers' who provide the capital for them to play with instead of treating it all as a no-lose game (for them).
Compulsory broadband? 09:16am on 27 Jan 2009 "The answer ... is Television"

Well yes, and we're already starting to see this happen. Look at the new Samsung flat-screen models that have internet access built into them - complete with a web 'widget set' that provides functionality.

I think it'll become like a souped-up version of teletext, delivering entertainment to our TV sets that's a lot more interactive (eg games).

I'm sure the ISP exec you spoke to thinks TV-on-demand is the 'killer app' that will drive broadband takeup. I don't think so, I think it'll replace video with mixed "rich multimedia" content.
Taxpayers to subsidise wage costs? 1:33pm on 11 Dec 2008 Woolies problems were cash-flow related to not being able to pay for stock while waiting for their customers to pay them. This kind of thing is why many businesses are failing suddenly - they are owed money which isn't being paid to them by their customers.

And, as 1 business fails, it stops paying its suppliers which creates a huge snowball of other failing businesses.

I reckon this is more important to the economy than any amount of fiddling with VAT and house prices, having a tremblingly weak currency isn't going to help exports if there aren't any exporters left!

And house prices aren't going to hold up if everyone loses their jobs, regardless of the new repo protection scheme, it'll end up costing us more in the end than if we did help out struggling businesses with their cash flows.
We own Royal Bank 10:03am on 28 Nov 2008 But what does this mean for PFI and the government's balance sheet?

I thought RBS (along with HBOS) was one of the biggest backers of PFI projects, so now the government is paying above the odds in PFI payments to PCI partners backed by a bank that it owns.

Makes you think that the government might as well have paid for those projects directly!
Spend, spend, spend? 10:52am on 16 Oct 2008 Government spending on public services...

will we get fixed water mains? nope.
will we get fibre-optic broadband to everyone? nope.
will we get a fast rail network? probably not.
will we get renewable energy farms? not really.

will we get ethnic diversity co-ordinators and housing development facilitators? oh yes.

A Lot of people have said for a while that the recession is inevitable, that we should bite the bullet and get it over with. Instead, we have Bubbles Brown *still* trying to prop up the housing market. The only good thing is that the next economy may be built on technology and engineering instead of selling mortgages and insurance to each other.

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