What Is An Investment Banker Worth?

What is to be done about the investment banks? Having been bailed out on a monster scale it now seems that they are intent on paying all their staff huge sums of money to prove that all is well. Today, we read that Goldmann Sachs has just collected, during the last 3months, record net revenues of $13,800,000,000 - ie $13.8 billion. Not only is this a record for any 3 month period in the company's history but it is 47% higher than the revenues generated in the previous 3 months. They have so much money sloshing around that their 29,000 employees will receive remuneration of $226,000 each for the LAST 3 MONTHS!!!! Apparently this will bring the total pay per employee to $384,000 for just the last 6 months. If things quieten down in the next few months and they don't do quite so well, each employee will end the year with average remuneration of only $700,000. If the next six months work out as well as the last 3 months then the average pay could be nearly $850,000 per employee. I thought that investment banks had paid obscene amounts of money in the past but this makes obscene seem just day-to-day normal.

Our government has chickened out of putting any controls on banks - at least that's the situation in their white paper. But it has got to stop. Here is an institution which was implicated in the financial crash and has had to have vast guarantees provided by the American government and now as people everywhere lose their houses and jobs and work for reduced pay these parasites gorge themselves on our guarantees and our money.

Think about it - soldiers - British and American - paid a pittance die in Afghanistan fighting for their country and investment bank speculators are paid ludicrous amounts of money like this.

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