Today the weather has shown a distinct improvement. After weeks of cold and rain and snow, today was occasionally sunny and it was distinctly warmer. I saw the first crocuses daring to poke their heads out into the sun. It was an excellent day in fact for the Royal Bank of Scotland to shake off the dusts of winter, throw open the windows and announce to the world that in 2008 they achieved the biggest corporate loss in UK history. A whacking great £24 billion; that is £65.7 million per DAY. How can any organisation achieve such levels of corporate incompetence? Did no one notice that they were chucking money down the drain on a monumental scale? Of course they did not. Because the brilliant Sir Fred Goodwin told them that everything was OK. But surely, even he could see that things were not OK. But there's more. They have given us, the tax payers, an extra £325 billion of toxic debt to look after for them. Will we ever get anything back? Possibly, one day. But there's even more. The displaced 50 year old Sir Fred Godwin has been given a pension of £650,000 per annum for the rest of his life. Now, my friend the pensions expert tells me that in order to achieve such a pension, I would need a pension pot of £11.8 million. Is there any built in escalation? If Sir Fred has got 3% inflation built in then the pot will need to increase to £18.5 million. When the government decided to invest our money into this bank, was it at some kind of mad hatters tea party. Certainly they were in the Wonderland of British Bankers where nothing is real anymore.
Now, hardly a day passes without some new nonsensical statistic of financial mismanagement being revealed to us. And the scale of the disasters grows ever larger. Yet the bankers and dealers still think they should be paid astronomical salaries and bonuses. Only at the week-end, I was reading an article by one banker who suggested that remuneration packages for bankers could fall by 50% in the next few years. It's not enough. There is no reason why city dealers and bankers should earn much more than the national average. If a bank - common or garden or investment - has 25,000 employees [aka Lehman Bros] I can see no reason why the average pay of those employees should be significantly higher than for the rest of society. Sure, some will work long hours [as many do in other occupations - and some others are more important than investment bankers] but I cannot accept that they be paid on average anything even approaching 10 x average salaries
Is there anyone who can manage this country before we are completely broke.
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