RBS Chairman: banker pay is too high

[Jeff Maginty]

..

[DodgyAgent]

"...banker pay is too high. It's been too high for too long, basically..."

"...the share of the cake between the shareholders and the employees has been wrong in banks, err large numbers of banks for err a good number of years. It needs correcting..."

BBC News - RBS chairman says bankers' pay 'high for too long'

Are you Ed Milliband's Goebbels? Is the Tannoy system not working ?

[bobspud]

Bankers get paid lots of money! Well I never. Really? I thought that massive scramble of applicants every year was because the pay was tulip and the offices awful...

The chances of any bank turning round and telling their wealth generating teams that they will be getting a more normal pay packet will happen just around the same time that monkeys fly out of your butt. I will even go for an accumulator bet that links the degrading of salaries with the queen mother raising from the dead and Elvis turning up in the Tesco supermarket in Wells...

Hows that?

Sorry to burst your bubble bankers are worth every penny because they have the ability to bet millions of pounds on split second events without going into meltdown and crying in the corner because the markets turning against them... They might be quite smug but then thats just unlucky if you happen to not be one of them. They might look like a good target of hate but thats because you are a serial whinger. Despite all the provado about trading being easy, the big stuff is high pressure and if you walked into a room of maybe a thousand candidates. If 6 of them could last more than 6 months without becoming a gibbering wreck or wiping out the desk with crappy bets then I think you would be doing quite well. Once a trading house finds someone that has a proven record of making money and not melting in the process, the market takes over and now every bank in a mile wants to cut their risks of taking on a loser and uses the one thing they have loads of to attract that individual. If a trader makes 6 or 7 million in a year how much do you think they:

a) Bought
b) Sold
c) Made a profit on the trade
d) Made a loss on the trade

If you lost 200K on monday 200k tuesday and 300k on wednesday. Would you have the balls to trust your instincts on thursday when the markets rally?
If you have any doubts about the balls it takes to press the button and make the trade why don't you get a second mortgage and try day trading in £100,000.00 lots? See how well you sleep over a weekend when you are 70K down and 350k invested in a market thats in free fall... DO you cash out and take the loss do you take more at a lower price or do you go short and try to hedge? You have to be wired very differently to the average human. one guy I knew quit the trading floors and used to trade CFD's for a giggle the one morning he was showing me his trades. He was quite pleased with the week because he was £10K up with a day to run. He had the value of his house placed in the deal. So he was effectively 10k good on a 600k bet that at one point that week was down 320k and he was sat in the canteen drinking coffee and talking about which pub we should go to for lunch...

Is that how you want to live? Do you think you could?

[AtW]

Sorry to burst your bubble bankers are worth every penny because they have the ability to bet millions of pounds on split second events without going into meltdown and crying in the corner because the markets turning against them...

[gingerjedi]

What I will never understand is how they 'generate' money from nothing? For every gain someone must be making a loss Shirley?

Dirty business IMO.

[AtW]

What I will never understand is how they 'generate' money from nothing? For every gain someone must be making a loss Shirley?

Nevermind the obvious stuff.

What about the fact that banks don't seem to be dealing with their very high cost base which is the bankers paid tulipload and instead they tried to save money to outsourcing peanut like cost bases that were actually their core competency such as IT?

You'd think a proper management of a big firm would be concerned about massive labour costs they have and very low returns for shareholders on behalf of whom they are supposedly working.

I mean, assuming this "x years of work experience in banking" is dropped, how many people can do 95% of the job half price? The job of the management is to find those people and to make their companies more profitable for shareholders, yet they do seem to be mostly concerned about getting themselves massive bonuses ragerdless of whether the company did well or not.

[gingerjedi]

Nevermind the obvious stuff.

What about the fact that banks don't seem to be dealing with their very high cost base which is the bankers paid tulipload and instead they tried to save money to outsourcing peanut like cost bases that were actually their core competency such as IT?

You'd think a proper management of a big firm would be concerned about massive labour costs they have and very low returns for shareholders on behalf of whom they are supposedly working.

I mean, assuming this "x years of work experience in banking" is dropped, how many people can do 95% of the job half price? The job of the management is to find those people and to make their companies more profitable for shareholders, yet they do seem to be mostly concerned about getting themselves massive bonuses ragerdless of whether the company did well or not.

If you worked in a cake shop you'd help yourself to the cream, especially if no-one ever asked you to stop.

[AtW]

If you worked in a cake shop you'd help yourself to the cream, especially if no-one ever asked you to stop.

That's not a problem - cost of cream is very low and you can't eat that much, same as in chocolate factory they'd let new employees have enough candies in first few days so that they hate the stuff.

Now awarding yourself real cash bonuses on top of massive salaries when shareholders get a finger is totally different, one would have thought in such labour intensive businesses share prices would drop to the floor, guess there are way why they ain't:

Goldman Sachs Spent More on 2011 Stock Buybacks Than It Earned - Bloomberg

"The company spent $6.04 billion to repurchase 47 million shares at an average price of $128.33, more than its $4.44 billion in net income, the New York-based bank said today. It also paid $1.93 billion in preferred stock dividends during the year, including $1.64 billion to redeem an investment by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. "

[gingerjedi]

I inquired about a short term loan form my bank (NatWest) and was offered 17.9% APR even though I have a maximum 999 point credit rating.

M&S (a bloody shop by all accounts) can do the same loan for 6% APR, I wonder what their bosses get paid?

I can only conclude that banks don't want to bother themselves with lending money anymore, I was under the impression they were bailed out to keep the financial wheels turning.

[AtW]

I can only conclude that banks don't want to bother themselves with lending money anymore, I was under the impression they were bailed out to keep the financial wheels turning.

I'd expect 30% APR from shops because they need to add their margin on top of their outsourced card providers who give money to people who might not be able to obtain credit from banks.