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Moral Hazard & The Price of Failure: RBS and Barclays Banksters NOT the whole story

Tom Winnifrith
Sunday 1 July 2012

The left has won the battle on this one. Hester and Diamond are in their sights and they smell blood. To be fair the banksters have been public enemy number one for a while it is just that now there is a chance that a head will roll. And in this case I would be demanding Diamond’s head for Barclays LIBOR market abuse. But I do so with a heavy heart because he is in a sense being treated unfairly as a result of something that has gone very wrong with Britain.

I start with the issue of risk/reward for PLC bosses. The pay of the men (and in a few cases women) who run Britain’s quoted companies (especially the larger ones) is too high. It has risen in absolute terms but also relative to inflation and also to the average pay of the folks they employ at an alarming rate over the past decade. We are not – in most cases – talking here about rewarding entrepreneurs who started businesses ( and thus get their reward from equity appreciation so aligning their interests with shareholders) but rewarding managers who have risked little or nothing in terms of capital in order to grow the businesses they run.

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About Tom Winnifrith
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Tom Winnifrith is the editor of TomWinnifrith.com. When he is not harvesting olives in Greece, he is (planning to) raise goats in Wales.
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