Gold Men, in Sacks!

Today David Cameron and Milly B will speech about excessive bankers pay. Now I ran my own company for many years and the aim was to extract as much profit as possible paying as little to the gov as possible. That’s what the company was for. So Goldmeninsacks paying £9 billion in salaries and bonuses and RBS paying £7 million to its chief executive isn’t a surprise. The significant difference is that I owned the company and they don’t. Delving further back my chief argument as a teenager was that “everyone else had 50p pocket money, an electric guitar, a motorbike, and stayed out late” etc. It doesn’t take a genius to realise this actually meant “someone told me a boy he knew had a friend who he thought had a bike, a guitar, a car” and this under the influence of teenage optimism meant I had an equal right to them too. These two memories make it obvious that bonuses will flame up like a forest fire from a cigarette end given the merest chance. So where Goldmeninsacks paid a meagre dividend and RBS shareholders, us, have lost money the execs have “just taken pay that someone somewhere sometime got, as reported in the News of the World.” So today DC and Milly B will, like weakling parents, bleat on our behalf that this isn’t nice. So what? As this extraction of capital is so obviously easy and unbounded I would have thought under some rule of corporate governance or common law there must be some limitation to it. Corporate governance for example requires that all stakeholders be taken into account. These include shareholders, debt holders and employees, so the disproportionate extraction of capital by a few to the detriment of the majority of stakeholders must surely be illegal, or at least governed by some ruling. Otherwise we might find our corporate captains ‘accidentally falling’ into lifeboats and leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.