A terrible beauty is born for RBS

‘As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly’. Proverbs 26:11

The news that Royal Bank of Scotland is still determined to pay out somewhere in the region of hundreds of millions of pounds in bonuses to its staff, is nothing more than yet another red rag to a very weary bull, and must not be allowed to happen.

Don’t these ridiculous people ever learn, don’t they get it? The world of the international banker is never, I repeat never going back to the ludicrous days where men and women with no particularly special qualifications apart from betting millions of pounds of other people’s money on the red or the black number, could demand and receive bonus pay-outs, some running into seven figures.

The British people have been lied to for years by the banking sector that only bankers and their employees truly understand the complex ramifications of the global banking sector, and we must all exercise a willing suspension of disbelief while the banks continue to reward their staff with vast sums of money beyond the dreams of avarice.

But it is just not true, and now they have been finally rumbled. They were driven by what criminologists call ‘the anomie of affluence’, which roughly translated so that even a banker can understand it, means that the more money you are given, so you believe that the ordinary rules of social and commercial intercourse do not apply to you. It also means that like any common drug addict, the more your ego swells, and the more the ordinary rules of engagement are ignored, so you need even more money to sustain the self-belief.

But when they have managed to screw up to such an extent that the ordinary man and woman is called upon to bail them out with public money, then the rules of engagement change, and change utterly, and when that happens, as W.B.Yeats, in his excoriating poem about the Easter Rising observed, ‘…a terrible beauty is born…’

The terrible beauty this time is the cathartic realization that the banks are going to have to finally run themselves as prudent centres of legitimate commercial business, and this must be done not just in the full light of public transparency, but also with public approval and legitimacy. The age of sleaze, greed and conduct amounting to nothing other than corporate corruption and trough swilling at the highest level, is over.

The kind of bonuses which have been paid to bankers in the past must be discarded for ever. These bloody people should be on their knees thanking us, the taxpayers, that they still have a job. Managers should be paid their basic salaries on the basis of how well they provide services which help most efficiently to manage their depositor’s monies, and how much value they can add to their depositor’s commercial interests, in the way of prudent lending for properly assessed commercial enterprises, mortgages for properly valued properties and rewards for customers who want to save money for future realisation. Credit card spending should be drastically policed, and all outstanding balances should be repaid within 3 months, so that extended credit, (one of the predicators of the current crisis) should not be allowed to run wild.

Directors should earn capped salaries, in the same way that President Obama has outlined in the US. CEO’s pay particularly should be capped at a sensible rate. No person in the public sector needs to be paid more than £300,000 a year. They should receive no bonuses of any kind, but they should only be rewarded with a small and limited number of shares (not options), when their institutions can demonstrate real annual returns in the form of distributable revenues. Their first duty should be to their depositors, not their shareholders, because banks are a unique institution, their very existence is determined by the good will of their clients and their money, and all too often, shareholders are being remunerated at the expense of depositors interests.

The taxpayer should simply ignore the squeals of anguish that these recommendations will unleash. Any bonus or enhanced payment is entirely discretionary, and should only be paid on absolute success. The practice of allowing bankers to grab huge slices from profits, while not being effected by the losses is absurd. Continuing to pay bonuses when a bank is losing money is not just bad business, it is positively criminal, it is straightforward theft.

Sorry, what was that, ‘we wouldn’t get the quality of bankers we need to remain competitive if this was the case’?

I don’t believe it and neither does anyone else, because we have seen the god-awful mess the so-called ‘masters of the universe’ have already caused, and if that was done by the best quality bankers around, then we aren’t going to be any worse off, so stick that argument for a start.

‘Some employees have guaranteed bonuses which must be paid, otherwise they will leave and go to work somewhere else’.

Good, let them leave and see if they can find a job elsewhere. As I understand it the streets of the Square Mile are swarming with unemployed bankers looking for desks, and they would fill the emptied chairs very gratefully. If you don’t like the job which you’ve still got, then bugger off and find another.

Sooner or later, the message that the bonus culture is over, once and for all, has got to be got through to these greedy bastards, whose actions have undermined the whole value-spectrum of contemporary life in Britain.

By their actions they have done nothing but inflate the expectations of salaries and other payments beyond the reach of Croesus, and this has spread to a whole range of other businesses, including a few in the public sector.

They have put a false set of values on local education by shopping around for homes near good schools, and then using their inflated incomes to purchase properties in the catchment areas, thus assisting to inflate the price of properties in smaller communities across the country beyond any measure of their real worth.

They have driven the development of a culture of trash, glitz and bling, whereby an entire parasitical business sector, designed to cater to their every whim, has been elevated to a state where its practitioners have become household name celebrities.

In any society where a chef, a hairdresser, a Champagne bar owner, a tailor, a shoe designer or a dressmaker can command more column inches, and become more valued and more rewarded than a nurse, a policeman, a fireman, or, God help us, a High Court Judge, then there is something very wrong and rotten within its national fabric. This state of affairs is directly linked to the greed-driven, bonus culture, and its days are done!

So, Royal Bank of Scotland, pay your bonuses at your own risk, but if you do, then Government should immediately step in, once and for all, and take you entirely into public ownership.

When are you bastards ever going to learn!