Last week, I sat on a panel at the Soho Literary Festival, having been asked to discuss how the bankers “got away with it” – “it” being extending too much credit; taking on too much risk; grossly overpaying themselves; and causing the financial crisis.
This was lots of fun (literary festival audiences are rather different to my usual wealth management audiences), but I had two problems with the premise.
The first is that bankers somehow caused the crisis single-handedly. There are six years’ worth of articles on this on Moneyweek.com so I will just say here that the banking industry had several partners in crime – stand up global asset managers and central bankers.
But the second is the idea that the bankers got away with their part in it. It isn’t really so. Not many banks went bust and not many bankers went to jail. But that doesn’t mean nothing has changed.
Take pay. Since 2011, the largest falls in income in the UK have been in the top 10% of wage earners. Most of that is down to falling compensation in the financial sector. The European Union has introduced a firm bonus cap and is now having a go at the “role-based” allowances system the banks introduced to replace super-bonuses.
Meanwhile, bank shareholders keep promising to keep an eye on compensation and are under so much pressure they might even do it.
Then there are the efforts to reduce moral hazard (whereby bankers behave as they like, knowing that taxpayers will bail them out): banks are being forced to hold more capital, and from 2018 the EU will have a system of compulsory bail-ins for troubled banks (taxpayers won’t be bailing them out alone – shareholders, bond holders and depositors will have to pay up too).
Next there are endless new rules (JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon reckons he needs 13,000 new compliance officers by the end of 2014 to keep on top of it) and fines.
The Conduct Cost Project reckons if you add up the fines for everything so far (PPI, Libor, general mis-selling, sanctions-busting, money laundering, etc) the total paid by the world’s top ten banks is not far off £150bn. That’s real money. And, given ongoing investigations into the foreign-exchange market, there is clearly more to come.
Finally, as the fines get serious, the sackings and suspensions have begun: Lloyds has sacked eight people over the Libor scandal, and is working to claw their bonuses back. Those eight won’t work in the City again.
And Deutsche Bank is withholding “several million euros” in bonuses from its current chief executive and managers, as well as former managers. Why? Because, says the FT, “it is seeking to hold senior staff responsible for a host of costly legal and regulatory decisions”.
This is good. If bankers are really to be held financially responsible for their bad behaviour, we are likely to see a lot less of it: if financial history teaches us anything, it is that bankers react to nothing better than a financial incentive.