So, apparently there are 5,000 bankers who will get million-pound bonuses this Christmas...

[edam]

wonder whether anyone would back my single-issue 'let's take it ALL off them and raise £5bn to pay off the national debt' party?

CraklinRosie - in a way I agree with you but to be perfectly honest the entire system got bailed out and every single banker/trader/broker who made a bonus this year made it because the system got bailed out by tax payers across the world.

I agree fundamentally with your stance as I used to work in the City and know how it works and I still trade financial instruments with my own money for a living. If I get it wrong though no one bails me out - that is what is so wrong. Fair enough if people want to take big trading risks and are bright and ambitious and entrepreneurial - but not by doing it with tax payers money at no real risk to themselves.

Let the bankers resign and go elsewhere if they think they are that good then let them use their past bonuses to trade with their own money. Pretty soon find out who really knows what they are doing. I do not buy the specious arguement that bankers need to be paid millions to do their job and definitely not using tax payers money.

Bravo, ABetaDad! I couldn't agree more.

DarrelRivers - I was reading the thread and thinking serious banking tsk tsk thoughts and then I saw your news and now can't remember a thing I was going to say! Many congratulations

I was pulling for Rivers No. 3 .

Thanks NorthernLurker
Lots of s
And obviously serious banker thoughts

plus ca change!

The tax-dodging was from one of DH's friends who worked for a bail-out bank (not RBS admittedly). A big 4 accountancy firm came in and gave a presentation on avoiding paying tax on their bonus. Basically the bonues would be paid as a "loan" from the company which would not be required to be paid back. Hopefully the budget statement next week will close that sort of blatant tax dodging. I find that and the whole "non-dom" scam outrageous.

In 2002 I had a contract working on a big programme to implement the Basel II accord into a financial institution. I was frankly shocked at the level of credit-risk management which was standard practice - and was told that it was actually better than most of the competition - which I now believe/see to be true.

Basel II put an onus on each bank/banking type company to make much more effort to control their institutional risk. I'd love to go into detail but I've been drinking and nouns are always the first to go... But (other than raising their reserves slightly in case of high-risk credit) they didn't acutally have to do anything (unless motivated by wanting to maintain a healthy estate) - just be 'transparent' to the FSA in how their overallrisk is calculated.

So it's really all a fucking joke, but if anyone talks about implementing a stricter regime (where, for example, you might insist on a bank making proper credit checks) you get told that you'll just end up sending businesses out of the country and harming the economy...

PerArdua - in 1996 I was doing the same thing in a big investment bank. Absolutely every single thing we implemented in that bank was clearly binned the moment we left the building.

Sickening and amazing stupidity of useless managements.

The institution I was working for probably did hold onto a lot of it - they've got through with no bail outs and public respect. But they chose to follow best practice, without inducements or coercion. Obv I shan't name them, but they are getting my mortgage next renewal

gold plated refers not to the amount of the pension received received by government workers but by the cast iron assurance of payment and avoidance of the vagaries of the market.

anyone working for themselves such as myself fund their own pensions and any tax relief on contributions are recovered later on receipt of the pension itself. the value of my pension is subject to the vagaries of the market.

that having been said I for one would resent not being paid my contractual bonus on the whim of the public. I doubt any person on here who works would feel differently.

the issue may be a broader one about how people are remunerated and whether they are encouraged to achieve short-term returns at the expense of long-term stability but that is a quite different issue and I can't see how that issue can be resolved without a seachange in market attitudes away from quarterly reporting to stock markets.

for the avoidance of doubt, I am not a banker nor a corporate employee receiving any bonuses - I have been self-employed for 25 years and more and thus have only ever received what I work for

It's not the 'whim' of the public, it is the entirely legitimate grievance of the employers. Us taxpayers.

All this guff about contractual bonuses - none of those guys would have a contract at all without Mrs Jones the school dinner lady and Mr Smith the bin man having rescued them.

Let them go. Let the bankers go. No one is indispensable, we are all told that at some time or another. That includes bankers. They seem to enjoy revelling in their own bullshit.

Erm, the tax payers would be a lot more out of pocket if the banks had been allowed to collapse.

I'm surprised so many of you seem to be buying into the Daily Mail bash the banker mentality.

The harsh reality is that if you make money for a company you earn money, bonuses need to be paid to keep our banks competitive. And yes, my DH works for a bank, he works ridculous hours, earns a fairly average salary and hasn't had a bonus for three years. If he doesn't get a bonus this year he will move to a bank where he will get a bonus. As will any one else who is good at their job.

Meanwhile, I work in marketing, earn as much as he does for less work and get a good bonus. Am I a bad person too?

Anyone know what proportion of bankers that 5,000 who get the £1m bonus represents? Not much at a guess.

oh please - the whole bankers' bonus [and for that matter any workers' bonus as why should anyone get a bonus for doing their job] is a simple combination of envy and naivety

and no worker has 'rescued' anyone. any government bail-out is guarantees, no hard, cold cash. how has anyone on these boards actually handed over anything in return for the government shareholding. it is all a theoretical indebtedness. it is perfectly possible to argue that the whole thing will turn in time into a moneyspinner for the Treasury

Just because the public would be even more out of pocket does not make it ok to pay huge bonuses. Isn't that just obvious?

I think the government should bail out the individuals and we let the bank go phut.

And by all means your husband should go ahead and move to a bank where he will get big bonuses.

You have lost all sense of what is right.

And I don't think this is about bad people. It is about an incredibly injust system.

"if you make money for a company you earn money". Yeah, right.

Actually if you look up the stats, you'll see there is very little correlation between company results and directors' earnings. It even goes the opposite way in some cases - the bosses pay themselves fat bonuses or massive pay increases in years when the company does very badly indeed. And if they really fuck up and get the sack, sometimes they walk away with millions.

When ds is looking around at careers, I'll be telling him to consider heading towards something where if you really screw up, you get loadsamoney...

I didn't say a "big" bonus, I said a bonus. He has worked solidly for 14 days with no break, regularly gets called in the middle of the night and works at least an 11 hour day in the office. He earns every penny. None of what he does is related to the state of the UK economy but yet anyone who works for a bank is the overpaid spawn of Satan.

Yes, the banks need to be accountable but they still need to be able compete in industry by retaining staff. That means paying bonuses or increasing base salaries to compensate for bonuses not being paid. It's just reality.

What an employee gets paid is related to the state of the company.

Crikey, most of us are getting squeezed - by dire forecasts of workplace conditions and resources as well as pay and redundancies - and it ain't pretty.

Many people do not see individual staff as horned devils. They see the Banks Are Special system as acutely unfair and frusutrating.

Well said wildorange. I am just about fed up of the jealous resentment.

What nonsense pointydogg - let's let all the banks go under, oh yes, no more banks, excellent plan to kick-start the economy. You have no idea how cataclysmic that could have been. Would you have preferred to see the entire UK economy go under, all of us lose our jobs just so you could point and laugh at bankers?

As for Mrs Jones the dinner lady, she hasn't been asked to contribute a single extra penny to anyone! Her taxes are simply being moved around in a slightly different way from last year.

Frankly, I resent chipping in for the £200 or whatever it is for the "Health in Pregnancy" grant. Helping middle-class Mums to upgrade their Bugaboo? No thanks. But do I get to complain about that? I bet not many of you turn down your Family Allowance either come to think of it...

Please stop the petty jealousy. Read a decent newspaper and try to understand the facts over the sensation.

I dont think anyone resents lower paid bank worker getting a bonus of say 50% of salary and nor do they even resent higher paid middle managers in say a clearing bank getting a bonus. These people work in what is called the 'narrow bank' part of the industry. The bit that takes deposits and lends out to good businesses and on sensible secure mortgages.

What people resent is the Board members and traders/brokers in the 'casino bank' part who basically bet the entire economy of the World in an orgy of speculation and ridiculous lending in order to walk off with huge undeserved bonuses then turned to Govts when it went wrong. The bonuses were undeserved then and are now because the deals they made (and are still making now) were utterly appallling and eventually lost huge amounts of money. Loss making bankers should not get bonuses but they did and still are - and paid out of tax payers bailout money.

We would not be having this discussion if the 'casino bank' system had been allowed to fail and shut down but the 'narrow bank' part of the system had been saved. The high rolling out of control casino banking sytem would no longer exist and no bonuses would be being paid at all.

There was an article in the FT yesterday saying there is £30 billion of UK commercial property mortgages in technical default which UK banks have not properly written off yet, another £16 billion has been rollled over by the banks that cannot be rescheduled elsewhere or repaid, another £43 billion of loans to be rolled over this year and £32 billion in the following 2 years. Most of those loans are on property that is worth les than the value of the mortgage. Some respected economists think there is still £1 Trillion of bank losses worldwide to be written off.

If it is any comfort the banking sytem is still bust and politically cannot be saved again. It will be detroyed when the markets crash again - casino bankers will lose their jobs and a simpler safer system will be created and put in its place.

Another 5 banks shut down yesterday in the USA. Look at the losses in Dubai. There are many huge undisclosed losses from toxic assets still in the banking system and yet bankers still take home their bonuses.

Don't talk to me about envy. Some people need to be in prison for what they did.