My Paper-Banking and Society-Ft Special Report -Thursday Nov 2010

Not that long ago, bankers were respectability personified. Funloving, maybe not. Risk-hungry, certainly not. Pillars of the community, absolutely. But the pecuniary crisis made everyone realise the safe old image was an anachronism and a grievous one at that. Ever since the crisis peaked a couple of old age ago, banks that gull not been spending all their time notwithstanding trying to stay afloat have been fending off attacks from politicians, regulators and the mass media. They caused the crisis. They live governments billions in bail-out money. What are they doing to make amends to society? perennially top of the to-fix list is the issue of bankers pay. Over the past decade, a gulf has opened up between high-street bankers who were the paragons of society a few years earlier, and deal-fixers and traders who were rewarded for riding the boom but have not really been punished for the bust. Despite being tarred with the same brush by the general public, the upstanding branch manager and his or her team up of tellers have just as much reason as the rest of society to feel bitter about the investing bankers.

They raked in the big money in the boom years, motivated by revenue-based subvention structures to run ever greater risks, regardless of the longer-term fall-out, and have continued raking it in ever since. That is partly because a low interest rate purlieu vital to prop up economies in the wake of the crisis has ironically favoured investment banking, but it is also partly an intrinsic byproduct of the capitalist securities industry: one bank cannot afford to cut pay if its rivals do not, for fear of losing its best staff. There have been attempts at a political and regulatory level to deal with the issue. The UK has gone furthest so far with the Financial Services Authority imposing restrictions on the structure of bonus payments and the last Labour government imposing a one-off bonus tax. The European... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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