Bankers, bonuses and my life living on miniature sausages
[Picture via @littlejuande]
I started out as a finance journalist. I was 21 and fresh from university. Almost every day, I came into contact with bankers in their larval stage. No older than me, they had emerged from their chinos-and-rowing-stash cocoons into the uniform of braces and two colour shirts they’d copped from repeatedly watching Wall Street. If you think Gordon Gecko is odious, imagine him at 22, called Hugo, freshly graduated from Cambridge and braying about how much he “loves the banter”.
I lived in a studio flat in Croydon. I worked in an ugly green building, editing articles about pensions and writing up interviews with identical looking men in identical grey suits. I spent my Friday nights dancing like a broken marionette to indie favourites at the Black Sheep bar. And I was happy. I had my best meals grazing on canapés at overly-ostentatious banking events. It takes no time at all to become a connoisseur of the mini-sausage with mash piped through it or teeny fish and chips housed in a miniature newspaper cone.
On at least two occasions at those champagne and tedious conversation jamborees, newly-hatched banker boys, who can’t have been more than 25, looked me up and down in my Burton suit and scuffed shoes and asked: “What’s it like being poor?” As full to bursting as their bank balances were, they suffered from a certain poverty of imagination. They’d strutted through the Milk Round and into the very banks that filled their debating society day dreams, the next stop was a lavish wedding and a wife waving Farrow & Ball paint samples.
Express incredulity at the idea that anyone would feel sorry for Stephen Hester with his £1.2m basic salary and Swiss hideaway and some will come swinging back that “it’s just the way of the industry”. Some animals eat their young, it’s just the way nature is sometimes, it doesn’t mean that the idea shouldn’t make us feel a little queasy. Feeling sorry for Hester while seriously disabled people are worrying whether their benefits will continue suggests a startling lack of priorities.
As Ian Penman pointed out, the rich make news stories as singular entities (“Super-rich man might get share bonus”, “Famous man’s daughter is pregnant) while the poor are lumped together as a mass until they get arrested or killed. Competition in a market usually pulls down prices. It’s why journalists’ pay is so pitiful – there’s plenty of people willing to do the job for next to nothing. But that hasn’t happened with executive pay. It remains buoyant regardless of the general economic situation. They might have steered us into the iceberg but the boys on the bridge are still earning enough to keep them in gold braid and fancy hats.
During the inevitable 5Live discussion on bonuses this morning, a banker’s wife gravely commented: “Sometimes they’ll have a bad year and not get a bonus at all!” I nearly broke down in tears at the sheer humanity of it. Just imagine the poor soul staring sadly at the array of luxury homes, speed boats and lovely watches in the FT’s How To Spend It magazine and realising that he has no “it” to spend.
UK employees are taking home £60bn less in pay, in today’s prices, than they were 30 years ago, according to a new TUC report [PDF link]. The idea that a banker on £1.2m a year or a supermarket boss on three times that desperately needs to be incentivised more than a worker on the shop floor who barely makes a living wage is preposterous. But still, I weep for poor Stephen Hester who must be worried now that the other bigger banker boys will laugh at him for his pitiful bonus-free existence.
