Picture: Intelligent men on board!
Many big international banks made losses in 2009. But they still pay their employees bonus', smaller ones maybe, but nevertheless. And funnily many of the bankers think that they rightfully deserve it (the public begs to differ). Why do they think that they deserve it? That answer might baffle you as much as it baffled me. I recently read in an article in the Financial Times that uncovered the basic belief in banking: success means wealth and also intelligence (dumb people don't get rich, eh). So if you are intelligent, you get rich (if you are a banker). And because intelligence does not disappear in a financial crisis, a banker still deserves a bonus. Right? Bankers also love to turn the equation around in asking: “if you are intelligent, why aren't you rich?”. Unfortunately, as we learned in the recent past, for bankers failure still means richness, as former bank CEOs like Marcel Ospel of UBS or John Mack of Morgan Stanley are testimony to. Maybe the government who bailed out big banks should start to ask what type of bankers or “success” their national banks need.
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