A true story: In order to gain membership at a trendy club in east London, a banker I know had to pretend that he worked in the arts, not finance. The club managers have made it known that City workers, flush though they might be in bonus cash, are just not the kind of people they want sullying their distressed-leather banquettes.
What a delightful irony. It's now more respectable to be an artist than someone who works in financial services. Tell that to your parents when they give you a hard time about going to art school.
Maybe we should start giving bankers leper's bells, or at least lessons in diplomacy. Because really – for people who are allegedly good with numbers, they're terrible at PR. Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein famously told The Sunday Times that, as a banker, he was just "doing God's work," which shows a slightly skewed idea of the Deity's game plan: And on the sixth day, He created credit default swaps, then took a very long shower and wished He'd stopped with the plants and the trees.
Barclays has just announced that its new CEO, Bob Diamond, got a $10.1-million bonus for 2010, perhaps as a reward for telling politicians that "the period of remorse and apology for banks" needed to be over. That must have been an apology only dogs could hear, because I think most of us missed it.
This week in London, the hard-partying billionaire Tchenguiz brothers, Robert and Vincent, were arrested by the Serious Fraud Office, which is investigating their involvement in the crash of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. Apparently undaunted by the arrest, the brothers – the Arthur Rubinsteins of the debt market – went ahead with a giant party on Robert's yacht, which is called Veni Vidi Vici. My Latin's rusty, but I think that means, "I came, I saw, I conquered." Perhaps their next boat (a dinghy) might be called Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
You know you've got an image problem when the governor of the Bank of England, who is probably not staying up late reading Emma Goldman, thinks you've gone too far. "Bankers were given incentives to behave the way they did. That's what needs to change," Mervyn King said last week in an interview with the Telegraph. Later, he told a parliamentary committee, raising his hands as if astonished: "I'm surprised the real anger hasn't been greater than it has."
In fact, there are groups that are trying to stoke the anger, from the fast-growing UK Uncut, which holds sit-ins at banks in America and Britain to protest against bonus announcements and corporate tax dodging, and an outfit called Robin Hood Tax (steal from the rich, give to the poor, get it?). Film director Richard Curtis and actor Bill Nighy are driving forces behind a proposed 0.05-per-cent financial transaction levy on "short-term, casino-style trading." The group estimates such a tax could raise $30-billion annually, 75 per cent of which would be used on services for the disadvantaged and fighting climate change in Britain and the rest for poverty relief abroad. The merry men got a (largely symbolic) boost this week, when the European Parliament voted in favour of a financial-transaction tax. The vote, however, is non-binding.
Now, Mr. Nighy is inviting bank CEOs to go with him to visit a hard-hit neighbourhood in Britain and a dump in Nairobi where children scavenge daily for food, to see where the redistributed wealth would go. I hope he's not at Heathrow holding his breath, or we might have to send an ambulance with extra oxygen tanks.
Bankers have hardly been persuasive on their own behalf, so I asked an honourable friend who works in London's financial district to explain why he and his colleagues deserve their enormous rewards: This trader (who remains anonymous not out of shame but because his employers frown on congress with the mucky press) argues that bonuses already help fill government coffers through income tax, and that the structure of rewards, in fact, encourages restraint. "In the City, salaries are small; they used to be generally £100,000 a year across the board," he said (that translates to around $150,000). "All the money was paid at bonus time, but only if the individual performed well or the whole bank did. If the individual doesn't perform, he gets no bonus and/or is sacked. Traders realize if they take a risk that doesn't pay out, they may not only lose their job but also their bonus – so the bonus culture actually promotes more prudence, I would argue."
That position, honestly held though it is, might not be quite enough to sway the public over to their side. But they'd better start trying.