How do Barclays bankers sleep at night?
Probably, by getting their jim-jams on and hoping into bed. Its the former Woolies workers that need to worry; unemployment is on the rise, and they are already in the dole queue.
What a country! What a mess.....
Barclays Bank is ready to award bonuses of up to £1.1 million to corporate bankers who pulled the plug on Woolworths and other leading high street names. The bank’s commercial arm, which lent to a number of collapsed retail chains, will decide soon whether to pay out millions in bonuses to top bankers.
7 comments:
Well to quote the Simpsons - which we often did...:
[Wolfgang Rainer states he got 80million dollars for 90 minutes standing in front of a wall]
Critic - "How do you sleep at night?"
Wolfgang - "On a large pile of money with many beautiful women..."
I would settle if these bankers were charged tax and national insurance on their bonuses - as (theoretically) required under IR35. This is not a capital gain, it is payment for work completed.
Of course, given that the treasury, FSA and government is institutionally corrupt, this will not happen... and bankers will be allowed to pay 10 to 18% CGT instead of ~60% higher rate tax, employees and employers NI... and, in ~6 years' time, the statute of limitations will have been past and another corrupt coup will have passed unchallenged.
What I despise about this is that they expect us to behave honestly when all round us rich people break the rules.
I used to be honest because it was how I was brought up and because it makes the world better but this shower have changed my mind.
I find this a more mottled picture. At the lower levels of an organisation: I have no problem with staff who significantly exceed expectations receiving bonuses; almost irrespective of the overall corporate performance.
Of course, at the higher levels an organisation they should receive rewards in line with the overall corporate performance. In the easy years they have done this in SPADES.
So to now take bonuses despite driving their companies into insolvency, and then getting bailed out by HMG, truly beggars belief.
This is not moral hazard - this is MORAL CATASTROPHY; as Mitch points out.
A big problem with this is that if the people at the top start falling on their sword then it would have to include politicians and that just isn't going to happen - BUT IT SHOULD IF THEY HAD A SINGLE OUNCE OF INTEGRITY.
Strangely Gordon Brown appears to be less a question of integrity lacking and more a case of completely losing touch with reality - a kind of delusional insanity. History will be even more unkind to him than Jeremy Clarkson.
The economy is the least of our worries, believe me.
Just about every institution, every constitutional pillar has had the muscle stripped out of it by New Labour.
The parlous state of our economy (and I don't doubt that healthier nations are in trouble) correlates directly to our un-Britishness; our defunct State, the tripartate Parliamentary cartel - the tamed British press, the politicised civil service...
My one criticism of you, Alice, is that you're a money-money-money blogger. You address the symptoms and not the underlying illness.
aSteve, why is it IR35? you claiming that the bankers are not employees of the company? What makes you think - like the vast majority of bankers - they are not paying tax on their bonuses? Tax that even if it was at 18% I suspect would be much much more than you pay.
But why only 18% of a (lot) of money when other people are losing 45% or more of their smaller amounts?
I don't agree with having higher rates of tax for those who earn more, I just expect them to pay the same rate as the rest of us!
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