Love it.

He's probably a Cambridge man you know. I too went to Cambridge...





























what a lovely day out that was.

This belief is ingrained. As people worldwide believe it. They create a self fulfilling prophecy as though not everyone with some training couldn't do what they do. They also as a result of aforementioned prophecy can walk into jobs internationally.

My main gripe is the jobs for the boys Non-Executive Directors and how they sort out the pay and bonus packages for their mates that employed them and they themselves get larges sums for doing very little. That really doesn't sit well with me. Though I think I've done it to death on the Sin Bin.

Private Eye have been doing a bit of digging and found that these remuneration committees are largely made up of other bankers. So the argument some committee said Hester deserved this bonus so he should get it is IMO completely undermined when you realise who actually sits on these committees. it is one set of bankers awarding pay to their mates in the industry and just another reason why it is a self serving industry at the top that needs reforming.

The banks are past masters at infiltrating, sabotaging, compromising etc. agencies charged with creating legislative boundaries of operation. Take Iceland in the run-up to economic collapse. It's estimated that a third of those working on the overseeing committee were former bankers whilst another third were headhunted by the Icelandic banks before they could complete their investigations. In the US the situation is far worse. The Madoff swindle showed the line between poacher and gamekeeper is now so hopelessly blurred it's difficult to tell who is working for whom. Consider the report by the incoming SEC inspector general, David Kotz, which showed that between January 2007 & June 2008 the enforcement arm received over 5,000 complaints about illegal and manipulative naked short selling and investigated precisely none of them.

Well the news has knocked nearly 5% off RBS's share price today. For the slow ones at the back (Labour supporters) that is a lot more than the £1m you were going to pay Hester.

Now I'm confused. Precisely why would this be seen as such a bad, bad thing that the share price would fall?

Presumably as they (investors) think Hester is doing a good job and he may leave now. Also, the role has become highly politicised and so nobody will find it easy in future. Politicians have a very strong track record of screwing eveything they touch up as they are often incompetent egotists. Once they start interfering and putting pressure on you know it'll end in a mess.

Because the person who posted it seems to think that share prices and the gambling thereof is in any way related to the real world, he probably hasn't noticed that as soon as shares fall then someone somewhere else snaps them up and all the little begging dogs sit up and start scrambling around to buy them back.

The stock market wouldn't exist without frightened sellers and bullshitting buyers.

Inevitable, given the bailout, I would have thought.



As opposed to the bankers and financiers who ensured that banks such as RBS needed to be bailed out?



That, Sir, is beautifully phrased.

Yes, very nice passage of text there but the reality is somewhat different.

The pricing of RBS shares will contain a larger element of "political risk" than completely public companies. Political risk is almost universally seen as a negative thing when it comes to investing, because politicians tend to be a fairly thick bunch who are prone to being swept away by populist bowlacks, rather than acting out of cold, hard, logic. Therefore the more influence politicans are deemed to have over the running of a company (generally) the more depressed the share price will become. It has been shown that politicans have more influence over RBS than was previously generally accepted and so the share price has taken a hit. It was the perception of political risk which caused the previous Government to set up UKFI as an arms-length representative of the Government when they invested in RBS.

The same mechanism is at play when pricing sovereign debt - Italy being the shining example. Why do you think they installed a technocratic Government?

The irony of all this of course is that the biggest complaint to come out 2008 was that you had a guy running RBS who knew nothing about banking (supposedly). Now you're all complaining about the Board of Directors and Remuneration Committee being made up of bankers, and of course we now effectively have politicans setting the agenda for the bank (hi George). So all in all I'd say you lot need to make your mind up exactly what it is you want.