MAIL Online: Have you tears to spare? If so, shed them now for the hapless partners in Goldman Sachs, the giant international bank.
This year, its remuneration packages will shrink by a third. The firm's 443 partners will receive a bonus of at least $1million (£650,000) apiece. It is equally tough all over the financial world. Average bonuses are expected to halve.
The nine biggest U.S. investment banks have set aside just $108 billion (£66 billion) for staff compensation in the forthcoming year.
A mean-spirited California Democrat, Henry Waxman, has written them a letter. He wants to know how they can justify this figure when they have just received $125 billion (£77 billion) in aid from the U.S. government.
Waxman says: 'I question the appropriateness of depleting the capital that taxpayers just injected into the banks through the payment of billions of dollars in bonuses.' And so say all of us.
Sour jokes apart, it defies belief that when the bankers of America and Britain have presided over the greatest disaster in the history of capitalism, they are still awarding themselves telephone number pay deals.
Aggrieved bankers say that they have lifestyles to support. Many are paying mortgage interest on multi-million pound homes in London's Holland Park or New York's Upper East Side. They have school fees to meet, boats whose crews must be paid, homes in the Bahamas to fund.
But to the rest of us, watching our savings and pensions shrink towards invisibility, the latest numbers show that the rulers of the financial system still inhabit a fantasy zone.
They refuse to acknowledge that this is year zero, a new and shockingly different world which they themselves have created.
They proclaimed the law of the jungle, the free market. When this failed, they demanded and received vast sums of our money to save them from its consequences.
Millions of people around the world are going to lose their jobs, many more their homes, still more their savings, as a result of the bankers' arrogance and incompetence. The least we expect is that they should share some part of our pain.
A mere 50 per cent cut in multi-million pound rewards is not enough. As a matter of common decency, a small gesture of contrition, no bonuses whatever should be paid this year. Bonuses for what achievement? For ruining us all?
For years, the financial engineers have perceived themselves as an elite, with a grossly exaggerated sense of entitlement.
Bankers have appropriated to themselves in compensation a higher share of their businesses' revenues than any other industry.
Even now that their ship has foundered in a fashion which makes the loss of the Titanic appear a trifling nautical mishap, they still suppose themselves deserving of places at the top tables, Porsches in driveways and villas in the South of France.
The banks claim that they must pay top dollar for top talent, or risk losing their best people to competitors. This is nonsense. Who is hiring?
What rational financial institution - if such things exist - would distribute more millions of pounds or dollars to the very people who have contrived the present catastrophe? Far from deserving homes in Eaton Square, these men and women belong in rented flats in Belsize Park. >>> Max Hastings | October 31, 2008
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