No one outside the banking industry itself – precious few inside it even – can stomach how much investment bankers and traders get paid. It’s the topic that simply won’t go away. Credit Suisse has made a bigger effort than most to incorporate all the latest best practice principles on pay – linking it to the bank’s medium-term return on equity, ensuring payouts are deferred and subject to claw-back if divisions turn loss-making.
But no one outside the industry cares about this stuff. They don’t care about the percentage of revenues that banks accrue for comp each quarter. It’s the absolute numbers that provoke disgust, outrage and disbelief. All three emotions were predictably vented last month when news broke that Credit Suisse had granted big cash bonuses to London-based staff whose pay had been cut by the UK government’s windfall tax on their bonuses...
