Sunday Sep 7 2008
All times are London time
My Financial Times column this week is about why it would be a bad idea to regulate investment bankers’ pay, a suggestion made last month by my colleague Martin Wolf. You can read my column here and post comments below.
About this blog
I am the FT's chief business commentator and this blog is about business, finance, media, technology and related matters. I live in New York so there is a bias towards US topics but I range more widely. Comments and criticism, which hopefully are at least as interesting as anything I write, are welcome. There is more about me on my columnist page.
While I agree with the claw back and restricted stock recommendations anything else would be counterproductive. I think the people who should perhaps be penalized are the board of directors.
After all they get paid large amounts and it is their responsibility to look after the interest of the shareholders and to ensure that the compensation to the senior executives is in line with the revenue generated. It is no use just firing the people involved and giving them golden parachutes.
Posted by: Avinder Bindra | February 14th, 2008 at 9:59 am | Report this commentYou miss one point, where you state regulators shouldn’t intervene for shareholders. I am sad to say that you don’t understand that regulators will intervene for those who were so thoroughly harmed by the greed of these bankers - those who lost assets they thought they “owned”. It is sad that this intervention will only serve to condone future “risk taking” that ultimately harms “we, the people”.
Because of this behavior, we may find ourselves in the UK and US governed just short of the Venezuelan model in the next quarter century. I am very concerned, laissez-faire appears to have gone too far.(And I’m libertarian!)
Posted by: W | February 14th, 2008 at 4:39 pm | Report this comment