A Merchant Banker and a salmon
A Merchant Banker and a salmon
It’s wrong to pile the blame for what’s gone down on the Bankers. – They were just doing their job which was to make money for the shareholders in the banks.
It’s also wrong to keep banging on about ‘bonuses’ – The money paid to front office staff and to middle management may well have been performance related pay, or even bonuses in the real meaning of the word, but the really big bucks paid out wasn’t bonus payments, it was commission.
Even to complain about that is wrong because it is wrong to sl*g off the banks for paying what they do, or to the people who get paid what they do, because a very great deal of what takes place in making money is down to networking between individuals.
It’s often said that ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ and in high finance it is far closer to reality than in just about any other sector and what the banks are paying is not only commission as a percentage of profit made but also to keep in-house a vital link to the world of banking. A bank pays for that vital link just as it pays for other data links essential for it to do business.
So if it’s not the bankers, and it’s not unreasonable ‘bonuses’ and the huge amounts are justified, who IS to blame?
In the case of the UK it’s Gordon Brown first and foremost because he was single handedly responsible for breaking the banking structure within the UK when he ‘liberated’ the Bank of England.
In so doing he broke the system of bank regulation and the means to deploy sanctions on those who didn’t adhere to the rules and so created open season on chasing shareholder value.
And with shareholders who didn’t give a four x for anything other than short term return what happened was inevitable as soon as Carpetbaggers came in with their worthless scrip and fractional reserve banking strategies.
Worthless scrip worth only trading with but never opening up.
So IS there a Merchant Banker responsible for the mess I the UK?
Oh yes, there certainly is.
It reminds me of an old joke:
Moshe was walking down the street when he was met by Rubin.
‘Moshe’, says Ruben, ‘Here I have some wonderful smoked salmon! Yours for five pounds!’
Soon Moshe was walking down the street when he met Danny.
‘Danny,’ says Moshe, ‘Here I have some wonderful smoked salmon, yours for six pounds!’.
Soon Danny was walking down the street when he met Joe.
‘Joe,’ says Danny, ‘Here I have some wonderful smoked salmon, yours for ten pounds!’.
Danny took the side of salmon home.
Soon Joe was walking down the street when he met Danny.
‘Danny,’ says Joe, ‘That salmon was dreadful! We threw most of it away!’
‘You ate it?’ asked Danny, astounded at what he had heard —‘ Joe, that salmon wasn’t for eating, it was for selling!’
Rog
