Stuart Fraser, the dude at the Corporation of London responsible for arse-smooching the rich and famous in the money industry has said today (in my new favourite paper ~ City AM - IT'S A SCREAM) that we, as a society are in danger of being anti the highly paid.
So, I asked myself if Bozo was one of those he was talking to ...
Well I don't think I am anti- them at all (although its hard to actually like them...). Let's face it Bozo worked for years as one of them (but made the error of never being quite good enough at it to actually be highly paid!).
Then again if we just dig deeper into the aritcle we read: "These are young men with short careers"
I wouldnt want to accuse the City of being sexist - but those are his words not mine.
The front page of City AM mentions the £53 billion paid by the City in taxes... They mention it would pay for 265,000 nurses.
Well it would have or could have but for the next 16 years its just going to be spent recovering the cost of the £850 billion bail out of that very same City! (I take the figures form the BBC here)
Yesterday Bozo said markets arent a bad thing, believing they are never wrong is a bad thing.
The City isn't a bad thing, believeing it is never wrong is a bad thing.
We can argue for years about how much the bailout did cost, has cost or will cost in the long term and so on and yawn. But the reality is that the City did need to be bailed out. It is a fact that if the City had been left to its own devices in 2008-09 that the financial system as we know it would not exist, after a number of high street institutions would have closed their doors forever thanks to City traders selling their equity.
The tax payer spent hundreds and hundreds of billions stopping that happen, and much of those billions ended up in the pockets of the people that caused the problem.
Mr Fraser needs to understand that the public at large are not anti- the City nor anti- big bonuses. We are anti- those bonuses being paid for failure. The City at large failed. And yet the public sees the City at large getting paid big bucks.in PR terms the City would decry that in any public business. In fact it did... let;s give you an example:
City analysts decided that poor Tony Hayward was a PR disaster for BP after the Gulf oil spill... he was derided for handling it very badly. The City sold BP stock because of the way Hayward handled himself publicly. What Hayward did eventually was resign.
What he didnt do was pay himself billions in bonuses.
Unlike Hayward and the oil spill, the City actually caused the crash. And, at best, paying themesleves billions for doing so was a PR disaster. That PR disaster is at the heart of the public's feelings about the city and highly paid and Mr fraser needs to acknowledge that. At worst - well let;s not go there...
Don't trumpet about your £53 billion in taxes when your failures take 16 years to pay off!!!!!
You aren't paying for any nurses until about 2025, until then the nurses paltry taxes are paying for YOU and your bonuses!
Allister Heath manages to get through a whole lead article without butchering the English language (a feat worthy of a City bonus in my view) - but he finishes by saying that "Capitalism requires that all bad firms be allowed to go bust, wiping out shareholders". So capitalism says you can make £53 billion a year in profits, but, if you takle big enough risks you will go down. This why HSBC wants to stay "too big too fail" obviously! But the thing is Allister, Capitalism also requires that all bad countries be allowed to go bust too.There's no point being all gleeful about the City's value in taxes to our country when another cock up in the city will kill the country off completely! Especially if it happens before we have finished paying off the last one.
The City is busy making snide comments about the public finances of every country in Europe... all of whom's finances are screwed because of bailing out banks...
Go figure...
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