Banking bonuses and the usual conservative whining

Firstly read the following item, the sequel to which has reappeared in the news this week:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/business/global/european-union-agrees-on-plan-to-cap-banker-bonuses.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Question:

How much does a banking bonus amount to?

If it equals one year's salary, how much is that?

Looking at this situation carefully, there is one point that you may conclude:

We are not talking 40,000 or 50,000 anything - be it Euro, Dollars or joke currencies like the pound.

400,000, 500,000, even 4 million or 5 million?

You would complain tomorrow if you received a bonus of $400,000 or €400,000? And not $800,000 or €800,000?

There are a very large number of people, many of them elderly and unemployable, in the UK who were told by the Tory government that they had to live on 53 pounds a week (= 2,756 pounds a year). A banker cannot do anything if he only gets 400,000 a year???? In fact he would leave his job and go elsewhere if that is all he were offered?

And the UK government thinks that that is critical? And the people forced to live on 53 pounds a week are just a pain in the rear portions? Well in the latter instance of course they think that, but then they despise people who were not born into wealth and had to live increasingly in the McDonalds economy!

Has a perspective gone missing here? Somewhere?

Well the banks' response is that they would have to upgrade their salaries to meet the demands of the new rules.

So the banks, if they are going to stay, have to incorporate the bonuses into their employees' salaries. And when the next crisis comes they will have to lay more people off!

Newsflash - it is 2008 again! Who caused the financial crash? The people living on 53 pounds a week? NO! The European Union? NO! The banks????? THE BANKS!!!! All the nice extra money that they can gamble with and lose and then get bailed out by governments so they can gamble again, and take more risks and lose yet more and get bailed out yet again???? And after the bailing out of course, the government will have even less money, so people regarded as unemployable will have only 43 pounds a week to live on!

The next crisis will come! They will lay off loads of people - as they did in 2008. So what's new???? That is unless some action is taken, globally, to stop banks acting like casinos!

For the record, the city where I now live, Frankfurt, is also a major banking centre. Not as big as London, maybe, but important enough. The German government has been the architect of the above legislation, and yet there isn't a lot of crying from the banks here for some reason! Major international banks may leave? Think of the business that they will lose in the world's fourth-biggest economy! Meanwhile as severe as Hartz IV here is for the people stuck on it, there is no forcing people to live on as little as 70 Euro a week yet!

It is time for some reality. It is time for some pragmatism. It is time to realise that we need to resolve the difficulties at all levels of society - my usual theme of creating decent jobs at all levels, full employment, less need for government to be bailing people out, wherever they are.

But feeding the needs of the greedy banking community and not expecting more disciplined and less frivolous behaviour from them? That should not be a high priority. The banking community should be there to serve, not to gamble or gorge itself!