Boards

Operating profits of £3.5bn, though.

the majority of the losses were due to writing off huge debts incurred years ago. The RBS retail activities actually make a profit, it's just that they disappear into a black hole created by the previous management

Their operating profit is being destroyed by the massive PPI provision they have to make every year.

you wouldn't walk away from £400,000 a week unless you REALLY had to

not for the first 3 or 4 months anyhow

to know what would work and what wouldn't. However, what I do know is we have reached an absurd situation in which the main powering force behind our supposed economic growth is being run with a logic of the ultimate triumph of greed over common sense. This came to a head in 2007/8 with the credit cruch and following global recession. We learnt about all manner of things about derivatives trading, about the packaging of debts, about the horrors of sub-prime mortgages and the repackaging of credit as something to sell to vulnerable people.

Typing all of this back makes me feel sick to my stomach. Successive governments did NOTHING about this. Absolutely nothing. The industry was allowed to run on its own logic and did so (especially in the US, but in the UK too) by a sustained campaign of lobbying and creative accounting. Successive governments created a monster which it was unable to control and were led to believe that any attempts too control it would lead to economic collapse. Well, the opposite happened.

Barack Obama isn't interested in sorting any of this out in the US, I know that (all of his key economic advisers etc. are people who are either ex-lobbyists or were high up in banks before the crash etc.) In the UK legislation NEEDS to be put through to monitor the activity of the banking sector more closely and to have more thorough auditing of its methods and products. It is a beast that if it operates on its own accord will spiral out of control. Which it did for too long and has caused untold hardship.

As such, capping bankers bonuses doesn't really help with this. It doesn't help regulate, it doesn't help audit and it doesn't help anything become more transparent. All it does is give a tokenistic and symbolic gesture to the people who supposedly `caused` the problem, when in reality they were abusing a system that allowed them to do it. Pay bankers as much as you want. Changing how much they get paid, to satisfy some kind of public bloodlust and little else, won't change anything.

...the more I think it isn't even that well-intentioned!

But surely it's a start.

It's probably the most that can be done, given how banking high-ups seem to be so intertwined with government, and probably have more of an effect on people's financial wellbeing than any government could anyway.

It's a phenomenon that people can understand and get easily het up about.

Ultimately the longer term challenges lie in sensible reform of a financial services industry that ameliorate the risks of a future crisis akin to what we saw in 2008. Part of that will be very difficult to do given the dominance of high volume trading and firms developing incredibly sophisticated algorithms to get a tiny edge in very brief transactions. But it somehow must be done, either through the re-inforcing of Tier 1 capital requirements as in Basel III or through other methods.