Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Bank Bonuses

This is getting somewhat steamed up. Populist clamour versus professional outrage.

Beneath it all there is something serious. It may be the most serious issue of our time. Huge taxpayer resources have been used to save the banks and bankers from ruin. This means that funds paid by the poorest in taxes have been sucked up to not only prop up the busted banks but to provide the solvency for the people who bust them to carry on earning undreamed of money. But they can only do this because the poorest have lost their jobs and had public services cut. There is something profoundly morally adrift here.

Lets at look at what these people do. They trade in incomprehensible instruments which have the effect of moving huge electronic sums around the financial universe. These profiteers, we are told, are good news because they spend their huge cashes of our money under their control for our benefit. This is rubbish. None of this money gets to inner cities to create home jobs in manufacturing and the like, nor in affordable housing, nor better education, nor healthcare, nor the elderly nor anything socially useful beyond some luxury industries employing in absolute terms a good deal fewer than the spin doctors would have us believe.

This kind of economy is morally corrupt and socially wrong. It is un-Christian. It is also illusory. It thinks it is creating wealth. It does the opposite. It creates no new wealth. It sucks resources from the base of the economy to feed its inflated asset values and dysfunctional balance sheets. It pours ever more resources into the pockets of so called professionals inhabiting a glittering corner of our capital calling themselves bankers, lawyers and accountants. Yet the providers of the essentials of life go with less or borrow more. Some , more and more, go without.

This has to be reined in. History tells us this kind of economic model is unsustainable. It will end in tears. History tells us too that tears may not be all. There may be blood. Time to put a stop.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.