In an engagingly frank piece on the Evening Standard Comment page of September 16th, City Editor Chris Blackhurst noted that ‘the bankers are still in situ . . . doing what they were doing before the downturn hit and behaving exactly as they did before.’ He goes on. ‘The authorities are pretty powerless to do anything about it,’ and ‘they [the bankers] can move forward in the knowledge that they’re seen as too important to fail.’
Now apart from Brian Sewell and the killer Sudoku, Mr Blackhurst is about the only thing worth reading in the poor old ES, but even so the correct response to this revelation is, ‘No shit, Sherlock!’
There may be a parallel universe where the regulatory authorities have done what is necessary to prevent a rerun of 2008, but its consideration is more for the pages of New Scientist than the poor old ES. In the generally rather wonderful universe that we must inhabit no change was precisely all the change that most of us expected. Hence the anger about which Mr Blackhurst based his article.
Bankers are still terrifically Thatcherite. By which I mean that like Mrs. T – or the Evil Snow Queen, as I prefer to call her – they profess to champion the ideals of the ‘market’, but, when push comes to shove would rather not trust to it (as that nice Mr Cable said in his conference speech on Septmber 22nd). Take bankers' salaries for instance. We are told they must be stratospheric otherwise the best will go elsewhere. OK then, let us just apply the laws of the market. Increase the supply of the best and the demands driving excessive payments will fall.
One way you could do this is to scrap tuition fees for degree courses that turn out people that tend to end up in banking. These people would leave university less debt burdenend, consequently their initial needed salaries would be lower and their increased numbers would also exert a deflationary effect.
Of course this raises the question of whether the British education system is capable of turning out sufficient quantities of the best, the sheer over-representation of non-doms in the banking sector suggests that the market in bankers is suffering some profound structural weaknesses. However, in theory there is no reason why this country should not be able to train sufficient numbers of people to work in the banking sector, after all many of the people I share public transport with daily already have a significant pre-qualification for a career in banking; viz an obvious and complete absence of any moral compass.
