Sunday, June 13, 2010
Going rogue
It is no surprise that Vince Cable has put his name to a cross-party committee report on the Future of Banking. After all it repeats much of the arguments he was making about the banking sector during the General Election:
In a report today, fully endorsed by Cable, the commission concludes that bankers should be given formal ethical training before they can take a position. Their performance should also be overseen by an independent body similar to the General Medical Council for doctors or the Legal Services Board for lawyers. "A crucial element will be the power that this body should have to discipline members who fail to uphold the code [of good financial practice] and in extreme cases remove their ability to practise," it says.
The study, developed by the consumer organisation Which?, also calls for an urgent clampdown on bankers' bonuses, including measures to link remuneration for senior executives to levels of customer satisfaction and complaints.
It calls for frontline and branch staff in banks to be banned from taking bonuses for sales, after finding examples of bankers earning six times higher rewards if they sold mortgages with additional mortgage protection plans.
In a move that will alarm the banking community, the report also recommends that the coalition government's banking commission – set up by the chancellor, George Osborne – should "consider urgently" breaking up the banks so that their speculative casino activities are quarantined from their everyday savings and loans business.
Reforms would also remove so-called "moral hazard", the idea that bankers have an incentive to behave recklessly if they know they will be bailed out by the public purse. It suggests that under a reformed regime, taxpayer lifeboats would be offered only to retail and commercial banks.
The Observer highlights that the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King has advocated similar radical reforms, whilst the Chancellor of the Exchequer has also leant towards these ideas. The paper suggests that the fact that Vince Cable has put his name to this report is seen as a clear sign of government thinking.
In a report today, fully endorsed by Cable, the commission concludes that bankers should be given formal ethical training before they can take a position. Their performance should also be overseen by an independent body similar to the General Medical Council for doctors or the Legal Services Board for lawyers. "A crucial element will be the power that this body should have to discipline members who fail to uphold the code [of good financial practice] and in extreme cases remove their ability to practise," it says.
The study, developed by the consumer organisation Which?, also calls for an urgent clampdown on bankers' bonuses, including measures to link remuneration for senior executives to levels of customer satisfaction and complaints.
It calls for frontline and branch staff in banks to be banned from taking bonuses for sales, after finding examples of bankers earning six times higher rewards if they sold mortgages with additional mortgage protection plans.
In a move that will alarm the banking community, the report also recommends that the coalition government's banking commission – set up by the chancellor, George Osborne – should "consider urgently" breaking up the banks so that their speculative casino activities are quarantined from their everyday savings and loans business.
Reforms would also remove so-called "moral hazard", the idea that bankers have an incentive to behave recklessly if they know they will be bailed out by the public purse. It suggests that under a reformed regime, taxpayer lifeboats would be offered only to retail and commercial banks.
The Observer highlights that the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King has advocated similar radical reforms, whilst the Chancellor of the Exchequer has also leant towards these ideas. The paper suggests that the fact that Vince Cable has put his name to this report is seen as a clear sign of government thinking.
Comments:
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I've always worked on Price jobs you get a price for the job you take it on or you do not.
I made a lot of money out of this when the national wage was about seventy five pounds a week i was earning hundreds. When the company stopped doing price work we did the jobs of course but we no longer took risks and the contracts took longer.
The worry is of course front line staff live off bonus payments, banking staff get the min wage, so if you want to do this you have to raise the min wage, not something I can see happening for a long time. OK some idiots abused it, thats not the peoples fault you remove the idiots.
But it's not the front line staff that caused this but the greed of bosses and governments, even one eyed Brown turned his good eye from this while the tax was rolling in.
I made a lot of money out of this when the national wage was about seventy five pounds a week i was earning hundreds. When the company stopped doing price work we did the jobs of course but we no longer took risks and the contracts took longer.
The worry is of course front line staff live off bonus payments, banking staff get the min wage, so if you want to do this you have to raise the min wage, not something I can see happening for a long time. OK some idiots abused it, thats not the peoples fault you remove the idiots.
But it's not the front line staff that caused this but the greed of bosses and governments, even one eyed Brown turned his good eye from this while the tax was rolling in.
# posted by 
: 1:17 PM
: 1:17 PM
the ethical training will not make any difference, its what they can get away with, ,I know this i was a broker for nearly for two years,
Banks being broken up is what needs to be done and it's not just taking heed of the head of Bank of England, why not listen to some academics in Uni Economics dept's?
Banks being broken up is what needs to be done and it's not just taking heed of the head of Bank of England, why not listen to some academics in Uni Economics dept's?
# posted by : 2:56 PM
: 2:56 PM
The big banks are not catering to the national interest vis-à-vis loans to small businesses. This is so IMPORTANT and the big banks are now so 'out of the line of reasoning' that they need to be broken up so that small businesses became relatively more important whereas right now small businesses are left to swing in the wind and going under needlessly increasing the risk of a double-dip recession or a worse double-dip than it need be. A similar problem is occurring in the USA and the White House, despite the rhetoric, is doing diddly squat about it.
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