Originally Posted by
henkybaby
That is why we keep having crashes and the tax payer has to cough up the dough to bail out the banks whose employees 'made them a lot of money' by selling/inventing those bogus products. It is legalized fraud.
Actually it was a form of alchemy - "converting" base metal into what looked like gold, and which you could bribe others to claim was gold.
Originally Posted by
henkybaby
Besides, I meant real contributions, not financial ones. Either you don't get my point or you don't want to...
1) we need Bankers (ie not traders) to borrow short & lend long to develop productive businesses that increase our productivity and improve our lives. As such they should be rewarded for the role they play, however society will fall apart and fail to develop if the facilitators scoop the pot and there's inadequate incentive for people to resolve the really important problems like how do we directly harvest solar energy and convert that to something we can use in aircraft.
2) one of the problems with the fee-based income that Bankers are earning is it doesn't reflect the long term gains or losses that come as a result of the M&A work - most of it's paid regardless of outcome. The most obvious example which I've used in other threads is Ferrovial buying BAA. That must have spun off 100 million or so in advice, underwriting, legals, accounting and the rest, but did it actually help any part of society? Apart, that is, from the subsequent sets of fees that were earned from re-financing the initial loans and then hiving off LGW? Have the people who earned those fees actually done anything socially useful? Is the World truly a better place?