George Osborne defends Stephen Hester's bonus

Funny you use the word 'worth' Quattro. Countless communities and marginalised parts of society are worth that money, one man is not.

Edam - Most banks would have survived just fine.

MrsJ - what free market? The whole point is 'the market' isn't working. It isn't 'free', it's reliant on government funding. Companies aren't making money for shareholders, they are acting as if they have no owners.

Quattro - there is a public servant doing that job, actually, he's called Stephen Hester. He IS a public servant.

Julia - yeah, it's a great con trick the government has pulled, persuading people with private sector pensions to turn their ire onto public sector workers, rather than asking where the hell all the money has gone. Much as the great con trick being pulled over benefits capping - so we won't demand wholesale reforms after the crash. Oh no, let the money men get back to their old tricks, while we bash the unemployed. In the middle of an effing recession when there aren't enough jobs to go round and many of those who do have jobs can only get part-time work when they need and want full-time...

It was Labour who agreed Stephen Hester's remuneration. There isn't really much the current gov can do, without seriously undermining the free market. If they interfered it would have serious consequences.

I really don't get this objection to Hester's bonus, I really don't.

There is no public servant in the land who could even begin to do a job of that magnitude. Hester could command three times as much money elsewhere, he's done a fantastic job of derisking the bank, he's met his targets, and he's contractually entitled to the money.

What next? Are you going to suggest that a mandarin should go out and play for Man Utd to cut down on the rewards earned by Premiership Footballers? A group of mandarins together winning the X-Factor?

Suck it up. Some people are worth gargantuan sums of money. Unfortunately. That's the free market economy.

Cogito - of course we are paying their wages, we are the owners of the sodding company! We are the ones footing the wage bill. Do you think any of them would still have a job without our investment? The company would have gone to the wall. Do you think they'd still have a job if the government sold all those shares? Of course not!

wannabe
"If we pay peanuts" - how is any salary over £100k peanuts exactly?

Does this mean that 95% of the working population are monkeys?

they clearly aren't the best though, wannabe. That's how they justified it before the crash - and then they brought the entire world economy down. The 'you have to pay megabucks to get talent' argument has been completely exploded by the crash. They paid Fred Goodwin millions of pounds claiming he was 'the best' and look how well he did...

Any actual study of financier's performance shows it's no better than random - put a trader up against a small child or even a monkey and the child or the monkey will do at least as well, if not better.

I think that's rubbish, I think £20million from 2008 wouldn't be peanuts....

"If tax wasn't what the govt used to bail out RBS and acquire 82%(?) shares, what was?"

The tax-payer bailed out RBS by buying shares in the company - purchasing a capital stake. The tax-payer has spent nothing on RBS since. We are not paying for anyone's wages or any of the other costs of running the bank. Those costs have to be covered by the bank's revenue, same as any other company.

When the Dragon's Den people invest £50k in someone's new business they aren't paying those people's wages.

The banks pay the higher salaries to get the best.

And presumably people want RBS to pay back what was used to bale them out.

If you start setting a double standard in that banks that have had government assistance cannot receive high salaries or bonuses but banks that haven't cannot (and you cannot dictate to private companies what they can and cannot pay their staff) then the best bankers will go to the banks that pay the higher salaries thus leaving the banks that were baled out by the government to remain in a weaker position.

If you pay peanuts... or to put it another way

If you want to best, you have to pay the most.

I would love the UK to go Co-Op everywhere....it's my capitalist utopia.

Of course our taxes are paying bankers - and not only the ones who were officially bailed out. They only survived because of quantitative easing and the taxpayer guarantee.

And it's the savings and investments of ordinary people that traders and bankers play with. It's our pensions that they are raiding. The value of private pensions has collapsed - while the people who invest them have done very nicely, thank you. (No-one's apologised for all those 'pension holidays' in the 90s when companies stopped paying in because the actuaries claimed the funds had far more money than needed to pay their obligations - and the government under Nigel Lawson told companies to stop paying in. Far less actually paid the money back.)

The whole system is rotten. Shareholders have no control - many only hold shares very briefly, others are overseas and don't give a stuff about British society. Executives are taking the value of companies and using it to fill their own pockets - not making money for shareholders as they are supposed to. Companies act as if they are ownerless.

Julia...great typo!!

Yes it is. RBS was bailed out by the tax payer. Footballers are paid by the ticket sales and revenue generated by the clubs, if fans stop watching footballers are not paid.

@PosieParker Your tax isn't paying a banker any more than it's paying a footballer. If you buy shares in a company it does not mean you are paying the CEO's wages.

@rabbitstew At no point did I say that that it's OK for footballers to be paid so much but millions don't seem to mind. Arsene Wenger gets something like £6m/p.a. with a potential £1m bonus if Arsenal win the Champions League. This appears to be completely acceptable to the average Arsenal fan.

As much as I loathe footballer's salaries if fans don't like it they can stop going to games and buying tickets....last time I looked I can't NOT pay my tax. The association between the banker and the pay frozen public sector worker and cutting of DLA is too close to justify this sort of pay.