Will Westminter follow the lead of the US congressman who has forced nine big US banks to declare the size of bonuses awarded to all their staff?
As he issued the order, the tenacious Henry Waxman questioned “the appropriateness of depleting the capital that taxpayers just injected into the banks through the payment of billions of dollars in bonuses, especially after one of the financial industry’s worst years on record”.
His point would apply to the UK, too.
MPs lack the power to demand such detailed information from the banks. (Waxman has given them a couple of weeks to publish the bonuses of the top ten earners and indeed anyone who makes more than $500,000 a year.) And, so far, British politicians have focused on the wage packets of directors, rather than other senior staff.
But Waxman’s approach is a sign of where political debate may be heading in Britain once the recession starts to bite and people take a closer interest in the workings of their part-nationalised banks.
Just to add some colour, here’s a clip of Waxman asking Dick Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, whether his $480m earnings were “fair”.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKsixRnJwj4[/youtube]
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey
