UK tax on £25,000 bank bonuses: Can it work?

Is a bonus logical?

But in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage collapse, many are now questioning the logic behind huge payouts to bankers. The argument has always been that the industry requires the best and the brightest if it's to provide the financial lubricant for economic growth. If they're not paid handsomely, the argument goes, they'll go elsewhere. But some of the biggest bonuses of the last decade were paid to the men (and sometimes women) who blithely fueled the asset bubble. That ultimately led to corporate bankruptcies, defaults, and a bailout of more than $500 billion in the US.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy, a ferocious critic of bank bonuses, recently won a political battle to appoint his own man as head of the European Union's financial regulatory body. At the September G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, Mr. Sarkozy pushed the US and other financial heavyweights to follow France's lead and adopt strict regulations over bonuses.

That effort fizzled out. But the fundamental problem with banking's bonus culture has long been understood – that profits and compensation are short term, while the risks and impacts of those decisions are long term. Nick Leeson, the so-called "rogue trader" whose reckless bets on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange in 1995 (when he was 28-years-old) led to the collapse of the venerable British bank Barings, which was then sold to Dutch bank ING for a nominal $1.50.

Mr. Leeson had engaged in deceptive practices to conceal the losses he was racking up. But in previous years he was the banks darling trader, delivering far above-average profits. He was compensated handsomely for this – as were his bosses. Evidence later emerged after the collapse that senior executives turned a blind eye to warning signs.

Nobel Prize winning economist Robert F. Engle III argues that bonuses don't need to be punished or stopped, simply aligned with the long-term interests of the banks they work for and the taxpayers who are ultimately on the hook. In an interview with RT, an English language television station owned by the Russian state, he said: "We shouldn't ban bonuses, but restructure the way they're paid... what's important is we give the banking system the right incentives to figure this out. When companies get too big and too complex to fail, they would face a higher tax rate, which would to into a rescue fund. The banks are not excited about it, they would rather go back to business as usual."

---------------

Why Obama's job creation plan focuses on small businesses

Previous

1 | 2