Living off immoral earnings

“The reality.. is that banks.. support a thick layer of second tier executives, as well as legions of pen-pushing, meeting-loving, middle- and back-office workers who are paid multiples of their worth and contribution, especially compared with other industries.”

-       Financial Times’ Lex column, January 19th, 2012.

“Stephen [Hester, CEO of RBS] is being urged by a number of people to accept the bonus and I think he will”.. This person [an unnamed senior banker] added that if [Hester] turned down his bonus, it would “demoralise” staff members and would send a signal that they now effectively “worked for an arm of the civil service or a utility, rather than for a bank.”

-       Unnamed banker, playing the world’s smallest violin on behalf of Stephen Hester.

Erik Schatzker (Bloomberg News): “$1.6 billion in compensation [at Goldman Sachs] is still a lot of money.”

Nassim Taleb: “Anything above zero is too much money.”

Erik Schatzker: “Why zero ?”

Nassim Taleb: “Because it is a utility. Anything you bail out, you should not be earning more than a civil servant of corresponding rank. Period.”

-       Nassim Taleb on Bloomberg News, Oct 18^th, 2011.

Contender for leading meme of our time is the idea, fast becoming conventional wisdom, that capitalism is somehow experiencing a crisis. UK Prime Minister David Cameron (or his speechwriter) suggested last week that it is now the time to use the “crisis of capitalism to improve markets, not undermine them.” If we draw a straight line back in time from the current financial crisis to the dawn of the same crisis, few would dispute that it was, and is, banks carrying the smoking gun. It was banks that made questionable loans to flaky borrowers – sovereign as well as individual – and it is banks that required extraordinary levels of involuntary taxpayer support to keep them “in business”, that is to say, keep their senior executives in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Unfortunately, in saving the banks from themselves, sovereign governments have now largely destroyed their own balance sheets. There is not, and never was, a free or fair market for banks. A free market would have allowed insolvent banks to fail. A free market, for that matter, would have no need of a central bank dictating monetary policy: the genius of the market is that it is perfectly capable of pricing money and interest rates in the same way it makes a price, every day, without fail, for the value of Tesco plc, crude oil or wheat. If the Prime Minister were capable of framing the problem correctly, he would have said that it was now the time to use the “crisis of statism to introduce markets”. Instead, career politicians in the coalition, with no practical experience of any world other than the political, have been busily urging the rest of Britain to become “a John Lewis economy” of motivated employee shareholders. As Martin Vander Weyer asked archly in ‘The Spectator’, “Have you wondered why there’s only one John Lewis Partnership, Mr Clegg ?” But then criticising the Lib Dems (official financial policy: join the euro zone) for economic confusion is like criticising David Blunkett for being blind.

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Comments

[Bobby Macintosh]

Quick question, a little off topic but on topic for your work in general: I know that this has probably been discussed elsewhere, but why was the original QE in Japan not inflationary/hyperinflationary?

[timprice]

I suspect because monetary stimulus on the govt's side was simply matched by apathy on the part of the household and private sector who were still busily paying down debts. Interest rates at zero don't work if nobody's interested in borrowing. This message seems to be lost on the Fed, the BoE and the ECB.

[Bobby Macintosh]

Thanks Tim.