if I am rubbish at my job

Well, who decides what’s rubbish? The shareholders or directors decided what position they wanted the bank to take and appointed someone appropriately. Blaming one man for the downfall of the bank is frankly ridiclous.

We’re all in this mess because of the culture of greed, risk taking and slack regulation. That dates back to.. ooh.. umm.. let me think.. who started all that? It’s on the tip of my tongue…

I think you’ll find if you broke any laws, and then got caught, you’d be in jail….it is the government’s job to produce and monitor the legal framework that runs the country

It’s exceedingly, er, rich of the financial sector to moan about the poor quality of regulation. Nobody was forced into ludicrous financial instruments – just as nobody was clamouring for transparency.

Tell you what: we’ll try staffing general surgery with half the usual number of nurses – and then take bets on the outcome. If a given % of patients survive the day, then we’ll award ourselves a bonus. Trebles all round! 👿

They weren’t forced into anything, they were allowed to get away with it by the regulatory framework. If the regulators didn’t understand the situation that isn’t the banker’s responsibility either.

If the regulators didn’t understand the situation that isn’t the banker’s responsibility either.

Utter pish. And I take as dim a view of the regulators/policy makers as anybody.

But WTF would I know – I just consume public wealth, as opposed to producing it.

Oh, the irony.

Everyone who works directly for RBS just got a 10-15% pay rise as a sweetener and anyone being paid off is getting 7 weeks tax free for every year they have worked for the company…

So if you’re a banker, you’re going to stand up in front of the shareholders and say “well folks, we COULD make a sh*tload of money here but I’m not going to do this because, well, best to play safe, you know?”

See how long you’d last in that job.

we COULD make a sh*tload of money

A sh*tload of imaginery money?

we COULD make a sh*tload of money

A sh*tload of imaginery money?

Which they spent on his imaginary security.

A sh*tload of imaginery money?

It’s still money. Same thing in banking, has been for a century or so. Even actual banknotes aren’t real money.

The man earned £billions for shareholders, can you get your head around that? £Billions!

I can get my head round that his “management” of rbs meant the bank being baled out to the tune of £24BILLION. To quote you

that’s billions, can you get your hed round that? £Billions.

How many of those £billions are disappearing now? How many pension funds will struggle to meet their obligations (including RBS)? How many people have endowments reaching their terminal values right now – do you wish you were one of them?

Unless you’ve led an Amish lifestlye and eschewed consumerism in all it’s forms for an indefinite period, then I fail to see how people can cast themselves as non culpable at least to an extent in this. Anyone whose had a job is reliant on the capitalist structure that is prevalent in the uk, which in turn has supported investment globally both inwards and outwards.

The vilification of a single person in this is ridiculous, a simple understanding of company finance and company law should lead you to the conclusion that for the majority of his tenure he was working, in conjunction with a huge number of other strategic decision makers to return money invested at the level which consumers, investors and pension funds expected. That’s us as consumers and pension investors.

That’s what has allowed this country to grow and have a period of unqualified optimism and consumer freedom. It was always going to be finite, but there were enough people who didn’t believe that which has contributed to the sudden decline we’re now in rather than a gradual slowdown. And now the armchair experts come out…

pk – what utter guff.
the banks (in general, not RBS in particular) went no small way to funding the superheating of the economy through ridiculous lending on mrtgages which helped push up house prices (which for some meant buying those nice holiday homes at prices which forced the locals out of the housing market), and lending beyond what they had the capital to support. If the banks were acting in the interests of us as consumers and investors, they would be making long term decisions, not the short terms they took. The only investors they were looking after were their own shareholders, and they made a bit of a mess of that, didn’t they?

This country is the same size at it used to be, what has given us “consumer freedom” has been a combination of fantasy money invented by the banks and what amnounts to slave labour in the third world. Both of which we will reap the rewards of sooner or later.

“Utter pish”

But its not though.

Bankers responsibility is to increase/inflate share price. Regulators responsibility is to stabilise the market.

The government were taking a hefty percentage of the “imaginary” gains in tax and using it to subsidise stupid levels of government spending.

The reason we are more screwed than most countries out of this is that the government were just as greedy as anybody else and have left us with nothing in reserve.

Bankers responsibility is to increase/inflate share price

Hence the ridiculous short-term bonus culture, which is what I was getting at. The “don’t blame us, guv – we don’t know no better and can’t help ourselves” line really pisses me off. As for public expenditure, I’d agree about el Gordo’s off-balance accounting (see also PFI) – although I’d have been happy with any political party which corrected past underfunding in the NHS, without fckuing it up. I can dream… 🙁

0pt1cal – Member

Everyone who works directly for RBS just got a 10-15% pay rise as a sweetener and anyone being paid off is getting 7 weeks tax free for every year they have worked for the company…

Utter pish

noteeth – around 20 years ago, teachers went on strike demanding to get paid for extra curricular actiities, like sport. They lost, sport was played less at school and guess what – now we’re in the grip of epidemics of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Why? short term thinking, hurray some money saved, some problems saved up for the future. and how do we address these epidemics – Blair sells off the school sports grounds. genious, sheer fekkin genius.
railways? shut the ones down that aren’t msking money and dig up the rails, now we’ve got congestion everywhere and no fekking decent transport in rural areas.
‘you what, most of us live near water, these are islands after all. The roads are congested and boats are more fuel efficient – let’s sell off the docks for over-priced fekkin flats, then in 10 years we can whine about how great it would be if we could use the seaways but we can’t because of all those fekking post modernist slaums

Was it Blair who shut down the railways? Err No
The docks round my way were mostly shipyards who f***ed them up and who demanded that every one should have the “right to own” their own home? What if they couldnt actually afford to , but could afford to rent it? Give them it for F all, and bo11ocks to any one who needs affordable housing- but they dont matter anyway as crayola has pointed out.
Deep breath Colnago…
(adds) oh and what was the name of that woman in Chelsea or somewhere who sold of all that public land for nowt to her pals, then left the country when she was pulled up about it? Nowt to do with Blair or Brown was it

let’s sell off the docks for over-priced fekkin flats

Bristol being a classic – stand by the old industrial museum. Let your eyes follow the interesting jumble of architecture, the pleasing mish-mash, all the way down from the top of town, and then… oh.

colnago.

it was westminster.