Have your say, and maybe i'll ring paxman for an interview with our conclusions. Personally banker or not, no professional should receive such outrageous amounts of money. I personally dont think although not having done it, a bankers daily job would be that difficult, its subjective of course but there are harder lesser paid jobs, so why the bonus? to keep talent in the U.K? then how come the talent contributed to such a mess in the first place? rewarding failure?
I'm in retail banking. I get fed up with being lumped in the pot with all the bankers bonuses. As much as I don't agree with the sizeable bonuses, I accept them the way football fans accept their teams salaries and the fact that they charge £40 for a shirt and another stupid amount for a season ticket to watch a bunch of actors falling over themselves to kick a pig skin about! Oh, I'm one of Diamonds lot if you are interested. Believe me, I get a pittance for the amount of work I do on a daily basis.
If you don't like the bonuses your bank pays you're welcome to stop using it. You may find it outrageous that bankers earn lots of money, but you'll find that it actually has nothing at all to do with you, and that neither banks nor bankers really care whether you agree with remuneration standards throughout their industry. Then again, you partly pay their wages, so I'd suggest that if you do dislike it, you should take the one option available to you which actually has an effect, and stop using their services
I take issue with the current culture in banks, but also with footballers - perhaps more so with footballers. Banking can crudely be split in to two parts - retail and not-retail. The retail banks are the ones we use on the high street, staffed by the tellers, personal bankers and so forth. These guys won't be making the £100k+ salaries with huge bonuses, but equally, you'd be quite surprised at how much money the personal bankers can make for what is essentially an office job with a customer fronting aspect. The tellers on the other hand, get absolutely stiffed for doing their work - I was shocked when a friend working for Barclays told me how little they were on. Now, the not-retail bankers are where the real problem lies. Why should they earn a sizeable yearly salary, and then double/triple it with a bonus? Why should they be earning multiple times that of a nurse working in intensive care, that foundation year doctor doing nights (both saving lives), or the school teaching providing education to the future generation in a challenging setting? Because they went to work, did what was in their job description and went home again? I totally disagree. Bankers go to their job expecting to 'make' their bank money, one way or the other. Manage to do that, and you're doing the job you were hired to do, regardless of how successful you are. Fail, and you're just bad at your job. Basically, bonuses should be for exceptional service or achievements, not just hitting a target. They should also be capped before they get ridiculous, and should also take past performance in to account - so we don't get the current farce of £1m+ bonuses for bankers that still owe the taxpayer billions. specofdust makes a ridiculous statement however. All the banks do this, so bar not using a bank full stop, there is no way to stop using the service or move your custom.
I agree with the bonuses to be honest, as if I was in that position then I would feel annoyed that other people think that I havent earned the money. Also in reference to the head of rbs, he was set a target to get a bonus, he achieved that target and they told him not to take the bonus. As a result, he declined it (as anyone under that pressure would) and subsequently, the share price dipped, therefore loosing the taxpayer money :/
To be honest if someone makes a bucketload of money for the company they work for I don't really see the issue with them receiving a bonus. Should other professions be as well paid/receive similar bonuses? Perhaps but the unfortunate fact is only certain sectors are able to pay that sort of money.
As a tax payer I pay taxes, so have to use a bank otherwise i'll be accepting cash in hand which isnt good. I have no faith in the banks. Theyre meant to be lending but small businesses are struggling, some people forget the bigger issues that face our economy. I am no economist but the banks are lending in the US, meaning they were able to create almost a 1/4 million new jobs, how much has the UK created with the help of the banks lending? The bonus is the tip of the ice berg, the entire banking industry within the U.K, but globally is rotten to the core and has been for years, would have continued to do so if it wasnt for leman. brothers going bust.
Although the argument to stop using a service to stop its owners is a valid one, I think that more needs to be done to level these "rewards". The example of the RBS's CE Stephen Hester receiving such a massive bonus (close to the million gbp mark) shows that something is wrong in this industry. The simple fact that 82% of RBS is owned by the government, i.e. the taxpayer, and that such amount are given away to people that are not very good at their job (see link below for share price / ftse graph in link below) is plain wrong. I any different industry, such poor performances and the damages caused would make anybody lose their jobs! Why should they get away with such reckless, short-sited and bottom line strategy and fail as well? When we are all told that the times are tough, the we need to tighten our belt, hearing such news is disheartening. This being said, every body is entitled a reward if deserved, but when your salary is is only slightly less than a million GBP a year, with a bonus doubling that while everybody is struggling is a bit s***, it shows no morals and no respect. I agree with capitalism, but not with corporate greed. This is almost theft imo! If anything, this money should go back to the share-holders, i.e. where it originated in the first place. Rant over... Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-16787368
well the greed would have went unseen for years if all the banking crisis didnt come about. I think rak500 summed up my feelings.
Because that's the job they signed up to do - make their employer lots of money, for a sizeable monetary reparation in the form of a three figure salary. Why should they get massive bonus for doing their job? To reiterate my points, bonuses are for exceptional performance, not just doing your job to the level expected by the amount of salary you are paid. As bankers are paid significantly to start with, they should be making money hand over fist to meet the expectation of their salary, and should have to massively exceed that to get a bonus.
for those who state this is similar to football, its just not, premier league footballers can be head counted, investment bankers are in their thousands per bank. Hardly relative?
They get the bonus because that's how the system works. If a bonus is awarded for satisfactory performance then clearly it's been decided that an appropriate reparation for that position is base salary + bonus. That it's split into 2 parts probably has a lot more to do with things like taxes than anything else. You could get rid of the bonus but i'd imagine all that would happen is the base salary would increase to compensate.
And therein lies my point. They are overpaid. The entire banking system needs an overhaul to remove these ludicrous pay packets, and the expectation of these. No other sector pays this - my dad has saved the NHS literally tens of millions in his career, and receives less than £70k a year, and when he does get a bonus it's a few grand a year. He doesn't expect more, doesn't demand more, no matter the fact that he is saving them significant amounts of money - that's simply part of his job. Why does an investment banker, making a few million, expect a sizeable compensation in addition to an already large salary? Because it's what banks do. The culture behind the pay system is the problem.
yes valid point. The scale of their pay/bonus simply is'nt proportionate would be different if they were saving the world, but they're not. The 90's are long gone and the excess should have gone with them
So what if they're not saving the world. You seem to be under the impression that bankers should be serving a public good in order to earn money. They owe you nothing. You have no right to demand anything of them. They do a job and get paid what the market pays them. That has nothing to do with anyone who doesn't participate in the business in some way, and anyone who does has options to react to their high wages. The public seem to have gotten it into their head that their opinion on other private people's salaries matters. It does not. We have no right to complain or be unhappy as anything other than private customers, and as private customers the bank in question will probably just offer to close your account, which you should do, if it really bothers you so much that bankers earn money.
Everybody has a right to earn money, everybody has a right to be fairly compensated for the work that they do. Jobs don't have to serve the public interest either - last time I checked there were plenty of jobs without public interest. Problem is, banks have a massive impact on the economy of the nation and the world...meaning a massive impact on the public. Plus the public basically owns several banks right now.
I think you'll find the public does when it owns a majority stake in the one of the biggest banks in the U.K, as a result of greed and ignorance, they put millions of peoples public money, savings and mortgages into jeopardy. Perhaps BBC didn't reach your office? So yea im pissed, i want the industry as a whole revamped but more importantly fat cats like hester shouldnt get a penny more than their salary dictates why? because we the public call the shots or rather have the government to do it for us. If joe public didn't own HBOS/RBS, I wouldn't give a toss but the fact that large, no stupid sums of money can be given as a bonus from a publically owned company then thats bang out of order.
A client of mine works in this area, and at the very top end of banking. These 1 million pound bonuses that are being bandied about by the press - really...they are a drop in the ocean, completely and utterly. 3, 4, 5 even 20 million pound bonuses exist if the performance is right. If you could do the job of a man who gets a million pound bonus, then you wouldn't be sitting on Bit-tech.net complaining about them. The majority of the public have no concept of the stress and difficulty these sorts of jobs entail. The RBS boss who got forced to give up his bonus, which was so unbelievably unfair, fulfilled his promises and targets set to him by the board. That man will have made many many many many times over what his bonus is for the bank and thus the taxpayer. Would the taxpayer stop complaining about banks because they think they have some divine right to how it is run? The nationalisation of the banks was risky to a point, but you have to realise that eventually these banks will be denationalised. We got share proportions for our money, and you can sure as hell bet that the money we lent them, will be repaid many many many times over once the shares are resold onto the market. The effective interest of these "loans" is going to be unreal. The public are equally as idiotic for accepting loans they cannot pay. The concept that you accept a 250,000 pound mortgage when you don't quite understand the situation the institution you are borrowing from is in (and this sort of information was well and truly out in the open, see someone like Peter Schiff if you want to know more) is utterly moronic and quite frankly deserving of the things that have happened. For people to insinuate that lenders had some sort of moral responsibility to people that couldn't be bothered to check out what their quarter of a million pound loan actually entailed....well.....god give me strength!!!! The last thing I want to mention, are the best bankers and bosses and CEOs in the world now likely to ship the UK to work for our banking sector when all it takes is a few newspaper headlines to make sure you don't earn your bonus which is the worldwide norm for the quality of your work? Think about the real repercussions of pressuring these handful of men capable of these jobs.
No offence thats nonscience, its a hard job like anyother they aren't doctors etc, they are worth their weight in gold, you want stress, go watch an air traffic controller for the day, and ask them how much bonus they get. I keep saying this, its about relativity, where is the balance? its not proportionate
The bonuses are actually considered a major problem for the entire world economy, both Denmark and somewhat the entire EU has actually been talking about having to limit these bonuses by law because the practice is dangerous for the economy. Why? Well if you are a banker and make a lot of money if you manage to squeeze out as much money from the market as possible and you have no responsibility towards the outcome of what you do, you have an huge incentive to take huge risks. These risk comes in form of speculative investments, see the American real estate crash for a good example, this creates the conditions for markets to collapse. again if everything goes bad, well you have no responsibility towards the thousands of jobs lost, famines, wars and turmoil that follows, so why not take the chance.
