murphycop wrote:
Really, what is so special about bankers? How can somone get a million pound bonus etc, for doing a bad job?
Thats the opposite of logical. Also, if their bonuses are taken away, they'll get up to a 100% payrise instead. The taxpayers had to bail a lot of banks out for christ's sake, then they get ridiculous bonuses with our money again? The world really has gone insane.
Well, the first problem is assessment of "bad job".
An outsider's perception might not really indicate anything, unless one recognizes a context. A bonus might be for loyalty, it might be for better performance than peers(who also could be doing bad), and so on and so forth. I mean, I do recognize that the bonuses that people were complaining in the US about after the Obama bailout were partially a matter of honoring a corporate agreement beforehand.
Here's the real issue with finance:
1) We don't have a really reasonable way to deal with gains and losses in our financial industry. The industry assumes that above average returns are a matter of ability(which there is research suggesting otherwise), and this kind of belief is not odd given the context, as most people in that position would believe the same thing.
2) The gains and losses are tremendous, so if you think that the best way to secure a massive gain was to make sure that the person responsible was happy, you would pay them a very large sum. This same phenomenon also occurs with law, and a number of other fields.
That being said, I think most of what the prior posters stated ends up being stupid. PatrickNeville is the lengthiest, and he's posting some idiotic conspiracy screed mostly produced to bamboozle people without the slightest conception of the system they are rejecting.