For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
1 Timothy 6:10
The bible has quite a few quotes regarding money, and none of them favourable. I do wonder from time to time if you can actually be a Christian and work for a bank.
As if we needed any more evidence of the immorality of these institutions, with incomprehensible bad taste JP Morgan has announced it is to award bonuses to the tune of £5.73bn ($9.3bn) but to just over 24,500 staff. I've harped on for years now, long before crash of lehman bros and prob drove friends and colleges of mine up the wall but the general public as a whole are now wise to what banks do (or rather don't do) to make obscene amounts of money out of thin air.
You would think that JP Morgan would at least have the common sense in the current climate to keep their head down and hold off on obscene bonuses for a year, because generally speaking keep your head down and ride out the storm and you can get back to being a shower of bastards in no time.
Iceland's banking collapse has seen the UK and Netherlands Governments hold this small country to ransom to the tune of £6.3bn ($3.6bn), a single private bank awarding £5.7bn to 24,600 staff really puts the sheer scale of this into perspective. The Icelandic people don't see why they should pay this back, they're not to blame for the irresponsible risks taken by their private banking system, you can sign a petition of support for them here.
It's difficult to get your head round the sheer scale of these figures, to be honest the "experts" in the banks couldn't fathom it out either so what chance do we have, but a good way to get the scale is to put 1 billion seconds in years into google. Google will return 31.68 YEARS so at £1 every second the bonus for 24,600 JP Morgan staff would take 181.57 YEARS to accumulate that amount.
So, What exactly have these people done to earn these bonuses, in reality sit at a computer gambling. There is a myth that this job is difficult but from watching "Million Dollar Traders" I learned that anybody can do this job, however they do need a certain aptitude. They need to be able to do basic mental arithmetic, they need to care about nothing but making money and they need to be completely selfish pricks. There was a psychological test in Episode 1 to figure out who the best candidates were.
To quote Lex Van Dam (any relation to Jean-Claude) the creator of the TV programme "When I worked at Goldman Sachs I went through a training programme and most people there had MBAs and the view was that you need lots of education to be a good trader but I don’t think so. It’s not that complicated, you just need to stick to a few rules."
The timing was a bit unfortunate as programme was during the start of the recession but as I recall by the summary of the experiment had shown that something like half the contestants had traded as well as the professionals during that period. So when "talented" traders threaten to leave the UK or move to hedge funds, let them, we'll find its not that difficult to find replacements.
Note: As i'm typing it appears JP Morgan have reneged to pressure over bonuses (Financial Times)
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