Indeed one of the things that surprises me most about the present zeitgeist is how incredibly unpopular bankers continue to be. I understood why bankers were the pantomime villains during the autumn of 2008 when Lehman fell under a bus and it looked as if the world was going to topple over. But why are bankers still hated two and a half years later?
Sometimes, the easiest way to understand a phenomenon is to simplify it. One of president Clinton’s advisers claimed that the key for winning the next election was “the economy, stupid.” In a similar vein, bankers continue to be loathed because most of them ‘don’t get it’. They are the new Marie Antoinettes with their let-them-eat-cake attitude. Bankers work hard (as they constantly tell us) but not that much harder than doctors, nurses or fire fighters. They therefore don’t get out much and mingle with ordinary people. The rest of us are tired of senior bankers’ smugness: their insistence that they are so much cleverer than the rest of us. This is patently not true. Most of the men running the big banks and investment banks in the developed world should be sacked. They all held senior positions at their institutions during 2007 and 2008 and are thus responsible for writing off billions of dollars of shareholders’ money, inveigling taxpayers to bail out the banking system and forcing central banks in these economies to keep interest rates way below inflation, penalizing pensioners and anyone with savings. Think about Jamie Dimon, Brian Moynihan, Lloyd Blankfein, James Gorman, Josef Ackermann, Bob Diamond and many, many more. What were they doing immediately before the crisis, say in mid-2007? Were they warning us that the world was about to implode? Were they scaling back leverage and running from the collateralized debt markets? Of course not: they were the great cheerleaders for the boom.
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In fact, it’s better to look at it the other way around: who is not on my shame list? Ossie Grübel (too busy playing golf, I believe), Vikram Pandit (running a hedge fund that produced mediocre returns) and António Horta-Osório, who managed to keep his nose clean — although I fear Santander Group might have a tough 2011. But let’s face it, most of our senior bankers didn’t see the crisis coming, and lurched through the bad times like a group of drunken sailors. If they were children, most bank chief executives would be told to sit in the naughty corner for an extended period of time. A mole told me: “Investment banking is the best trade union in the world. As long as you’re in the union, you’re safe.” My views might seem extreme. Trust me, they are a lot less extreme than those held by most people who don’t work in finance. After all, I was a banker for 18 years and I still have many friends who are bankers.
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Abigail's people of 2010
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