I am a banker. Some of us did not f*ck up.

[RBM]

I am a banker. Some of us did not f*ck up. (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.)

by Jerome a Paris:

As a number of you know. I am a banker. I've been financing projects in the energy sector for close to 15 years. I'm aware this diary can and will be seen as self-serving, and indeed it is. But I hope it will also be seen as a useful explanation.

Banking has always been both a utility and a casino. On the one side, you have the vast payments and cash management network, the retail business, the basic corporate lending or brokerage business and a lot of advisory work. On the other, you have the more market driven activities, the support and/or participation to corporate mergers & acquisitions, commodities and securities trading, all the way to own-account speculative risk-taking. The two used to be mostly apart (indeed, the Glass-Steagall Act kept them legally separated), but the line has become increasingly blurred.

The George Soros thread is the inspiration for this post. I'll bet almost no one here is familiar with the author, which is a secondary reason for this post.

This is an attempt to get readers to 'drill down' a bit into the complexity that is the world today. Happy drilling !

[Monte314]

I get where you are coming from. The general population, however, will not.

Most people just want a target for their anger. It doesn't have to be the right one... protestations of innocence will make you appear not only greedy, but self-serving; perhaps even conspiratorial.

Ya' know... it's how people are. Tough luck.

[eternaltriangle]

Yeah - guys like this are why the furor over AIG is misplaced. In a company that does 80 billion dollars worth of business, there are going to be some departments that actually do well. It is just plain good policy to have incentive programs in place. I am glad it looks like the proposed tax will fail, because something like that would really hinder the recovery.

Lets say you are the CEO of a bailed out bank, and succeed in turning it around - saving taxpayers (who have a substantial stake in the bank now) lots of money. Wouldn't that be the kind of thing we might give a bonus for?

[RBM]

I get where you are coming from. The general population, however, will not.

Most people just want a target for their anger. It doesn't have to be the right one... protestations of innocence will make you appear not only greedy, but self-serving; perhaps even conspiratorial.

Ya' know... it's how people are. Tough luck.

The author admits to 'self-serving' aspect.
Think triage.





RBM added to this post, 10 minutes and 8 seconds later...

Yeah - guys like this are why the furor over AIG is misplaced. In a company that does 80 billion dollars worth of business, there are going to be some departments that actually do well. It is just plain good policy to have incentive programs in place. I am glad it looks like the proposed tax will fail, because something like that would really hinder the recovery.

Lets say you are the CEO of a bailed out bank, and succeed in turning it around - saving taxpayers (who have a substantial stake in the bank now) lots of money. Wouldn't that be the kind of thing we might give a bonus for?

On my reading list, is a personal blog of a guy who is a professional journalist, from Greensboro NC. He is one source of many articles I have read, that dissect the financial industry instead of treating it as a monolith industry. Many times I have seen an AIG post at that blog.

Unfortunately, there are other forces at work, maybe even stronger forces.

The kind of thing to give a bonus for belies what the goal really is and it's not about saving taxpayers money.