Banks and bonking

Still struggling to get into my own blog… On signing in I keep being told that I don’t have a blog. I have to re-set everything each time, sometimes with success, sometimes without.

More bankers bonking to the pop of Bollinger corks. The focus is on bankers, but all the big corporations do similar things. Through the major national boards on which I have served, and my contacts with top 100 companies who sponsor exhibitions I have seen at least a glimpse of the ethos that now permeates huge firms. I have also seen the incestuous nature of remuneration committees, whose members are for the most part determining the comparators for their own levels of remuneration.

The culture is of macho management (perpetuated by boards whose members belong to the same  cadre) that sets up the climate for smart-ass manipulators of mechanisms whose only aim is to exploit the financial system, regardless of whether this screws the clients whose interests they are supposed to be serving.

The massive rewards are justified on the grounds that we have to pay for the best at an international level. We can see what the “best” have done. I would be happy to see the best defined in terms of probity, public service, responsibility and competence. Surely we could find people to do this for £1 million a year. Does someone who is paid £2 million work 2X as hard and with 2X the dedication as someone paid £1 million? And so on up the scale. Let other countries pay for the macho manipulators if they want to.

As I have said previously, the nature of what is called the “market” is that it serves to facilitate businesses charge the maximum they can get away with. Since they are all doing this, the predominant impetus is towards ever higher prices for customers, not reduced prices through competition. Competition acts only as an intermittent and partial restraint. At the level of huge corporations the only serious competition is to become big enough to ingest or crush other companies. Since Google and Facebook do not look like traditional companies we should not think they are any different.

But there are no viable political parties that are even thinking about such things.