Saturday, Aug 29, 2009
Socially useless
The Times: Too big for their own good
A tentative threat by regulators this week to slap a tax on City trading has triggered a furious response in the Square Mile. Bankers and traders are hopping mad. Even the CBI has blasted the idea. But I wonder whether it wasn’t the suggestion that some bankers serve no useful purpose that really got under the skin of so many people.
Posted by devo @ 09:34 PM (631 views) Add Comment
8 Comments
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1. devo said...
I'd like to take this opportunity to coin and claim a new acronym:
SUBs
Socially Useless Bankers.
2. bystander said...
"The masters of the universe in hedge funds and bank arbitrage trading might see their roles in a different light, but that is in essence what they do.".........................in essence they are gamblers who now know the can play whatever hand they like and the house will pay up. Interesting that the words moral hazard were bandied around early in the crisis, but now that all governmnets and central banks have begun printing money and the big gamblers (banks one and all) know the will not be allowed to fail, the words have miraculously disappeared from Merv the Swerve's vocabulary and everyone is cheering the returns of big profits and therefore big bonuses for the 'gambling inhabitants of Wall street, the City etc. Something needs to be done, but this will need to be done on a global scale as the FSA has said.
3. devo said...
"To be belittled by the FSA, which entirely depends for its livelihood on fees levied on these supposedly useless organisations, was also felt to be a bit rich."
I hadn't realised that (naïve, I know).
It explains a lot.
4. devo said...
From the article: Can anyone really argue that the mess that the industry has propelled the world into is a price worth paying to keep a few tens of thousands of people in work and bonuses?
5. Mikelivingstone said...
I posted this on the Times:
Lord Turner's comments are spot on. Ninety percent of the banking infrastructure we have doesn't create wealth - true wealth comes from the creation of goods and services to be used and consumed in the real economy. The banks have created a huge, central bank funded game of monopoly which operates in its own a parallel universe. This would be fine if they were actually using pretend money, but of course central banks and Governments have allowed them to take their monopoly money profits and mix them in with real wealth backed currency in the real economy. This defeats the purpose of money which is to store value, act as a medium of exchange and to operate as a mechanism for signalling demand/supply and pricing in the real economy. As a thought experiment, imagine we banned the banks from dealing in Dollars, Pounds, Yen etc. and forced them to use their own special currency called the Bancor. I wonder what a Bancor would trade at on the currency markets? My suspicion is that it would be devaluing as fast the Zimbabwean Dollar.
6. clockslinger said...
Idle young should have benefits cut becaue they contribute nothing (see article by Portillo in Times also on this site) so it really must follow a tax for the banking elite for activities which, far from "contributing nothing", have the proven potential to positively screw up the finances of the state for an entire generation must surely be an unargably reasonable proposal. What do the Tories out there say?
7. mken said...
Angela Knight was on the BBC (again) lambasting this idea and talking about how the UK had to remain attractive to competent bankers, excellence etc. etc. ... surely not the same competent bankers who orchestrated the credit crunch so beneficial for the UK.
8. shipbuilder said...
Clockslinger - you mean that idea that the 'rules' of society should be applied evenly? You mean someone who is struggling to get a job is not infinitely more evil than upstanding politicians and businessmen who have destroyed the economy of nations? What a quaint and endearingly naive idea!