Over the last 10 years, the City of London has paid out £61bn in bonuses to banking staff. The recent bank bail-outs have cost more than that. Effectively, 100 per cent of their outsize bonuses have been paid for by the taxpayer.
The street cleaner on £15,000 a year is paying for the high rolling banker’s lifestyle. Dear old Uncle Joe Stalin would have had a very simple remedy for bankers — the lucky ones would be making sure that we do not run out of salt for the roads this winter.
Before we get on our moral high horse we might care to look around us. Greed is everywhere. Remember the dot.com boom with all those idealistic young techies who were going to change the world? When dot.com became dot.bomb, billions of pensioners’ and savers’ money was wiped out. But not before the idealistic executives in the top 20 dot.bomb busts took out a cool $2.6bn in bonuses for losing all that money. Idealism was spelled g-r-e-e-d.
Greed is not a private sector monopoly. Look at our very own cabinet ministers. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, says her main residence is her sister’s house. Her second home is where her children live. This curious claim just happens to allow her to maximise her allowances from Parliament. Two other cabinet ministers, Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls, are married: this allows them to claim two sets of housing expenses. Then there are the Lords cashing in on expenses and selling access to dodgy businessman.
Is there anyone out there who is not milking the system?
In each case, the greedy can justify their greed to themselves. The bankers talk about working 18-hour days (sometimes) and making big profits (when not making bigger losses at their casino). The dot.bomb types talked about taking all that entrepreneurial risk. The cabinet ministers explain that everything they do is allowable within the rule, which they write for themselves. So it is all just fine to be as greedy as you want.
The only known antidote to greed is fear. Until the greedy face the real threat of long prison sentences, they will keep going. At the moment, the worst that happens is that they get fired — for which they get a big pay off.
I am tempted to mount my moral high horse. But I fear the horse is called envy.
(Illustration:HikingArtist.com, CC2.0)
