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Wages of bankers in the US 1910 to 2010
This is one of the small signs of impending economic trouble that it has been, apparently, too easy to overlook. The size of the wage growth in the financial sector is roughly equivalent to the explosion in the financial credit markets. The secondary peak in the graph is what some people call the great depression of the 1930s. The benchmark wage on the upright axis of the graph is defined, I think, as the average wage in finance relative to the rest of US society. You’ll see it has only fallen below average in the mid-to-late 1970s during the recession of the Ford and Carter governments when the skills of bankers were actually not in great demand.
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The piece I wrote about here has been published and has caused a stir in the printed media. Cartoonists like to hear someone has noticed what they are doing and so the publication of this news has produced a little surge of collective joy in the trade which the author notes here with an accurate and wry eye.
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Twenty questions, none of which are a direct help when you are thinking about starting your own bank. Should we be happy that the moving force behind the potential new institution is a law firm?
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Congratulations to whichever professional image-maker encouraged the new President to appear in front of some books. Any hint of a respect for the past and for the wisdom provided by previous human experience is long overdue from any recent inhabitant of the White House.
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My colleague at The Daily and Sunday Telegraph Christian Adams is working on a piece of writing about drawing and caricaturing Gordon Brown and asked for an opinion. It’s a rather difficult thing to articulate, so I drew something small in my sketchbook to help me think…
UPDATED: 16.30. To be slightly fairer to the PM he did, yesterday, apparently, stop the all-party attempt to stop full-disclosure of MPs expenses. Blogger Matt Wardman has done a fine job of journalism in finding all the MPs in the house who do actively support full disclosure of MPs expenses. Three cheers for all of them – and him.
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Yesterday’s unprecedented Government action to try and ind insure the unknown debts of the UK’s banks appears to have failed in its immediate aims to stabilise shares in the banks.
The debts and liabilities of the Royal Bank of Scotland alone, which the government and the taxpayer are now effectively insuring, are larger than the entire annual gross domestic product (GDP) of the UK. There is a fine information graphic (PDF available at link) in the print edition of The Guardian newspaper this morning which explains this simply.
Alphaville has picked up an interview from The Scotsman newspaper with Stephen Hester, Chief Executive Officer of RBS, you can read it here. Large job losses seem inevitable at the bank.
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The financial markets have now had a day to look at the second rescue of the banks proposed by Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling. The FT’s Alphaville blog has this thought on it. The chap repeatedly pictured, in the (flak?) jacket, is the current head of Royal Bank of Scotland, Stephen Hester. This pen profile of him – from The Telegraph – talks about his dry sense of humour.
The qualities and experience that he will bring to the role include a highly respected intellect, an enormous capacity for work, experience of the banking sector both as a lender and a borrower, and a sense of humour that is so dry some have quipped that it has long since evaporated.
I bet his sense of humour felt like evaporating today.
UPDATED: 19.45. Away from the cheap jokes, Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling reports the idea that the partial nationalisation of the banks we currently have, is now a contributary cause of their continued aversion to the risks of making loans.
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The eve of President-Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration would be a very good day to bury bad domestic news, if only the financial news wasn’t so very bad and so very big.
