Brendan Barber
Barclays have paid out £2.7 billion in bonuses, after making pre-tax profits of £11.6 billion in 2009. These super-profits show that banks win in both good times and bad.
Paying huge bonuses when people are still losing their jobs and business cannot get the loans they need because of a crash made in the finance sector goes against every concept of fairness.
Richard Exell
Reporting of pay trends in recent months has fallen back on a bunch of shared assumptions about what people have been paid last year and are likely to be paid this year. Unfortunately a lot of them are just plain wrong.
Here’s my top ten pay myths – see how many you can spot in your favourite newspaper:
Nigel Stanley
First it was Tessa Jowell. Now it’s George Osborne.
Suddenly everyone is feeling mutual - wanting to turn bits of public service into co-ops.
I am sure that there is much scope for the extension of mutuals and co-ops in society as a whole (and we should welcome today’s Conservative interest in mutuals - I seem to remember the last Conservative government as a time when the demutualisation of building societies was at its peak.)
And of course many think that Northern Rock should eventually be denationalised by transforming into a mutual.
Naturally the air is thick today with Labour attacking Conservative plans, but I wonder if they don’t have more in common that the party political dogfight would concede.
Adam Lent
There’s a very, very old joke about a man in a hot air balloon who runs out of fuel and suddenly has to ditch in the middle of a farm. Unhurt, he brushes himself off and calls out to a passing rambler asking if he can enlighten him as to his whereabouts. The rambler thinks for a few seconds and then replies, “you are situated on arable land characterised by cereal growth and livestock husbandry which is itself located in the countryside close to the south coast of England”.
Rolling his eyes, the balloonist asks if the man might not by any chance be an economist. “I am”, says the rambler, “how on earth did you know?”. “Simple”, replies the man, “what you have just told me is completely accurate and totally, bloody useless”.
Nigel Stanley
I’ve just been reading about the Eurostar enquiry.
No evacuation procedures, no staff training, no first aid kits.
Truly health and safety gone mad.
Owen Tudor
No, honestly, some of the attacks on the Robin Hood tax are just getting frantically silly. The Financial Times, who failed to cover the launch of the campaign, and turned down the opportunity to report on a letter from 350 economists who favour the tax (you see, it’s not just Bill Nighy and Richard Curtis and 70-plus national organisations), has finally reported that some people oppose the idea of a financial transactions tax. But suggestions that the multi-billion dollar currency trades will be forced off the City trading floors and into the back streets are surely just a little exaggerated?
Nigel Stanley
Yes, you read that right.
If you are trying to achieve a given level of retirement benefits it is cheaper to do it through a Defined Benefit pension than through a Defined Contribution pension.
The evidence is here in this important report from the National Institute on Retirement Security – a US pensions think-tank. This has been in my reading pile for months, but it’s taken a day off to get round to reading it.
Adam Lent
Striking, I thought, that those ferociously bright people who work at Goldman Sachs and deserve every penny of their multi-million pound bonuses as a reward for their vast intellects haven’t worked out that if you rig an online poll using the same IP address over and over again you might just get caught. Maybe they believed the right wing blogs and thought the Robin Hood Tax campaigners would be too dim to work it out. Anyway the Goldman Sachs genius has bought the campaign another day of very wide publicity. Thanks guys!
Owen Tudor
The Financial Times’ lead editorial today says that a global financial transactions tax is a non-starter, and then goes on to explain all the problems with a global bank levy – almost all of which would be solved by a global financial transactions tax. It ends, spilling the beans, by attributing to cynics the idea that the banks “have calculated that if they must concede something, insurance is the least-worst option.” I must be a cynic then, because that’s precisely what I wrote when bank levy fever swept Davos last month! And the Robin Hood Tax campaign launched this week (covered by almost every major news outlet apart from the Financial Times) will ensure that a financial transactions tax is anything but a non-starter.