General Chat

Yahoo News "More than 400 staff at Barclays earned pay deals worth more than £1m last year"

This is totally justified in a large and successful bank and I doubt anyone will be unhappy that men and women are properly incentivised and we keep best financiers in Britain.

I am sure everybody agrees. Please sign below if you are happy with banker's earnings.

Just 'cos you can't to maths there is no reason to moan.

Most firms pay what they must to get the work done.

When I was 27 one of the technicians ( female as it happened ) kept moaning that I was paid 5 times more than she was and it wasn't "fair" 'cos she had kids and I didn't (then). So I got her to try out the job for a whole day ... what a riot. After that no more grief and rabbit rabbit.

Paying those who know their way around Black-Scholes costs a wee bit more than facing shelves in a supermarket but mostly somewhat less than the cost of a footballer to park their arse on a ManU football bench.

If anything like a significant proportion of City trading buzzed off to , say, NYC then UKGov would take more than the trimmers to benefits, it would take a great big chopper.

Oh sure, the economy will be "rebalanced" with more "hi tech manufacturing". Ho hum. We have had 3 years of devaluation against €/$ and not the slightest surge in exports. Why not ? 'Cos we already make as much high tech as we can. Thanks to the bloody useless schools and suppression of apprenticeships there aren't enough guys n gals for the job. Oh, wait, I spoke too soon British Industry is saved, here come the Bulgarians.

The retail banks plan a future with no high street staff except for sales. Maybe.
TESCo plan a future ( already testing in some stores ) with nobody on the check out either.

The rather hard fact of life is that there is no longer any economic reason to pay vast numbers of unskilled and semi skilled people very much at all. There are plenty of social reasons of course hence tax credits.

So it goes. Welcome to 1928.

"we keep best financiers in Britain"
As opposed...?

Errol. Think Rollo answers your question. They can go where they want and spend their millions. NYC, Bombay, Beijing.

I am just surprised that more people today do not start their own bank. If there is a margin of, say, 3% between what they take pay in interest on savings and what they charge for secured loans, they should make money. That is probably how Mr Barclay and Mr Lloyd started.

Seems a very simple business proposition - ideal for someone stuck at home with a computer and a good brain.

um John have you not heard of the FSA? lmao
incidentally I was questioning your English earlier - it was very confusing.

The margin on lending is nowhere near 3%. If it was then the attempts to refloat RBS would meet with more success. You appear to be thinking about supermarkets again.

Well to get a full on banking license is not easy, a few billion of your own or somebody else's money helps no end. Due to the tight margins ( see above ) small scale banking does not pay.

A major alternative to standard banking used to be the mutuals but most were rolled up into the caring ( ? ) banks and became such terrific successes as the Bradford & Bingley, 1st line source of funding for the B2L One or two survive.

A bit further down the feeding chain there are the credit unions.

Of course what you suggest can be done without any license, all you need is a thick notebook, a large black 4WD with the windows darkened and a few heavies. That is where outcasts from Wonga Land end up.

fwiw one of my ancestors did indeed run a bank in London. It didn't go bust.

I actually worked in banking in Captain Mainwaring's day. (National Provincial). Would have been AIB if I had ever been able to master bookkeeping.

I have to say that both banking and retail were remarkably simple in those days. Think that is why I was employed in both industries. And, even when I was in a large branch in the City (75 Cornhill) I never remember half the stuff you have written about.

Isn't most banking very simple? When I was first a bank clerk back in 1964 my dad was an "Open All Hours" Ronnie Barker. And I remember telling him that the only difference was that our stock in the bank was notes and coins.

Bankers might be able to do Mathematics,speak or write in a way that the man in the street cannot fully understand, but not everyone thinks they are anything special or deserve to be paid large bonuses.

This money comes from the high interest rates forced on small businesses, who in the present economic climate need loans to allow them to keep from losing all.

You do not say what the job was Rollo, or whether she was given basic training in what was necessary, but I am sure that she was well 'put down' by your actions. Not quite the way good management deals with things these days without finding themselves at a tribunal.

Carol. Most managers 40/50 years ago would not have a hope today, would they?.

I remember having 500 people applying for one job in my supermarket (stock controller on double wages of a cashier). Nobody in store wanted job, so had to recruit. Did it through the job centre and they just seemed to send anyone along to justify their existence.

So selected first on basis of age - they had to be aged 25-45. Secondly on sex - it wasn't highly paid enough for a man. Thirdly on grounds of ethnicity - if they had a foreign name, they probably couldn't speak good English. And, lastly, on where they lived - had to be a nice area close by, so that they could walk to work.

List whittled down to less than 20. Secretary did a quick screening interview and 4 were put in front of me to grill with probing questions like "Have you ever been in trouble with police, have you got children, are you planning a family in next 5 years, why are you not married?" Then offered job to the prettiest one.

Doubt you could do that today :-D :-D

I was never a banker, what made you think I was ?

Branch banking is even more boring than a solicitors office - my cousin was a branch manager and the boredom quite literally killed her.

It may be a surprise for some that banking and accountancy are not at all the same thing. HM Customs and Revenue tend not to understand either which is why there is such a big shortfall in tax, not shenanigans by Starbucks et al.

Staff recruitment is another very dull and time consuming affair that has been taken over by "Human Resources". The trouble with these people is that they err in favour of the safe which can be ok but is not the way to fame fortune and especially profit. Thus most managers by pass H.R. for critical positions.

If you have to think about tens of thousands of staff My Cocoa's approach would take a month of Sundays!

There are not that many pretty girls anyway and even fewer with brains. Those who have both tend to do well but often overstep themselves.

Men OTOH almost always lack of visual appeal. If they have any brains they keep it to themselves as most managers view a brainy subordinate as a threat. That is especially true with the Army hence the never ending cock ups with a history too long and bloody to go into here. There are of course those with the cunning Baldrick plan of appearing to be stupid, thus rising steadily through an organisation until they reach the top when it becomes obvious that they have been stupid all along - e.g. current occupant of no.10. I do not mean Larry the Cat. This is known as the Peter Principle. Not all the front bench are stupid so he should be careful.

Banks do not have any stock. Cash money is not stock. It is just a credit written against the Bank of England. Many people do not appreciate that there is no "real" money at all, only Bank of England debt and the currency is part of that debt. It has been like that since the founding of the Bank of England with the brief and disastrous experiment with the Gold Standard.

Double entry book keeping is the foundation of all commerce even for supermarket managers. The demise of the Soviet Union was as much down to a failure to implement proper accounts as anything else. It matters.

I guess these days that modern computer systems have reduced the need for branch store managers to know anything about bookkeeping. The phrase "balance the books" comes from double entry.

Mr Cocoa is right in saying that retail banking to individuals and SMEs should be simple. However it is next to impossible to make money out of this kind of banking which is why banks try and sell financial services.

Sometimes they overstep the mark e.g. by selling credit swaps to small biz who have no idea what such a thing is. If the EU is successful in its aim of splitting "casino banking" from retail and capping bonuses then my goodness both UKGov and the man on the street will half feel the draft up their fanny.

Osborne knows this of course hence his objections. fwiw the EU has no legal power to set bank bonus EU wide but lack of legal power has never bothered the Commission.

The interest rates charged to small businesses, medium businesses and indeed any business have very little if any linkage to banker's salaries. The rates charged are a reflection of the risk should the loan go bad. Unfortunately lending to most lines of business in the UK is risky hence the rates. Ditto individuals.

The large sums paid to bankers dealing with financial products such as credit derivatives, swaps and so on are related to correctly judging the risk on a transaction. Tiny fractions of a penny and micro seconds can make the difference between loss and profit. This is not "casino" banking as My Cable would have it but the way in which large scale business and trade are financed.

Mr Cable is full of tosh beyond words. Everybody knows this but he has a political role, to keep the beards and sandals wing of the Liberals as quiet as possible.

Right now what keeps Mr Osborne awake at nights is that ordinary ( not mansions lol ) houses are over priced by quite a bit, 30-50%. That is the main reason why mortgages require big deposits. There are a great any mortgages seriously in default. Banks are not however rushing into repo because if the mortgage loss was "crystallised" into book losses we would have another full on banking crisis. In its ever helpful way the EU wants profit/loss shown on the accounts as you go along rather than when the asset is sold or a loan terminated. Mad.

As well as people with dodgy mortgages there are thousands of companies, trading but financial "zombies" who are allowed to go on again so that the bank does not have to crystallise the loss. Unfortunately the funds taken up by these zombies are a big part of why expanding small companies find it so hard to get credit on reasonable terms.

As Mr Cocoa thinks all this is a breeze maybe he could send his c.v. to Great George Street for consideration by Sir Humphrey.

I am sorry if this is a bit long. Well done anyway if u got this far.

sleep well

Rollo. Well I read all of it. Understood about 90%.

Made a lot of profit running supermarkets without understanding double entry. And I doubt any of my close colleagues would have mastered it either. Job was relatively easy in those days - hit sales targets, keep stock loss down and keep your wage bill to 4% of sales.

Retail banking was not much different - though my highest postion was No 3 cashier in a 12 man branch (out of 3 cashiers). But I guess manager was tasked with increasing sales (by lunching and golfing every day) and reducing costs.

I think this depressing picture of a few people earning boodles for not much and workers earning a pittance for doing a lot is too true. Very Orwellian imo. The microsecond judgment of professional footballers earning £50,000pw and the microsecond judgment of a banker earning £20,000 pw need to be well rewarded.

But so does the microsecond judgment of a soldier in Afghanistan and a nurse in the Royal Glamorgan Hospital. I don't know exactly how much they earn, but probably a lot less than £20,000 a week.