Remember when you were a kid and you got extra pocket-money for doing absolutely nothing? The joy that lasts ephemerally, but is none the less a welcome boost to your dire finances as a kid. When all is said and done there is very little between that kid and the HSBC bankers that are getting their increase in pocket money these days to avoid the cap on salaries from the European Union. You have to hand it to the Brits, they defy the EU, slap Brussels in the face and then go and ask them to pay for the weather damage to the country. Have they no shame? I guess where money is concerned, shame doesn’t have a lot of room. The trouble is, that kid / banker will be needing more and more of the increase in his pocket money in the future. It’s all about satisfiers and dissatisfiers. What satisfies today will become the source of dissatisfaction tomorrow.
HSBC Bank has been giving Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver £32, 000 ($53, 000) a week extra to avoid the cap on his salary (now at £1.2 million ($2 million). Either HSBC is just the first bank to admit doing it or the others will now quickly follow suit. What a double waste of money. Laws are obviously there sometimes to have smart guys thinking up new ways to dodge them. The art of the administration should be to constantly work to get around the tricks of the trade and paper over the cracks in the walls that allow for such things to happen. But, the EU is a machine that takes ages to actually get into motion; the cogs of the wheels move so slowly that the banks have thought up ways of getting around the voiced opinions that have petered out into a mere echo heard now far off in the distance.
It’s all about side-stepping and HSBC has just disdainfully rebuffed the boys from Brussels. As if the pocket money wasn’t enough, the bank has also revealed that there are 239 bankers working for the HSBC that were paid £1 million in 2013. Boardroom greed it was once called, with soaraway proportions. The European Union had stated that banks would have to restrict bonuses and cap them at 200% of salary. Stuart Gulliver has taken on the guys from Lilliput and whereas the latter used to be no bigger than six inches tall, the former is obviously into six-figure sums rather than anything else.
• Gulliver will be getting £1.7 million paid out every quarter, ensuring that his salary and bonuses combined reach £4.2 million a year.
• HSBC will be giving 554 bankers cash bonuses.
• 111 will be getting shares that cannot be sold for a period of five years.
• Gulliver also gets £79, 000 for the use of a car in Hong Kong.
• Accommodation expenses stand at £229, 000.
• Profits posted by HSBC have risen by 9%, reaching $22.5 billion at the end of last year.
• Bonuses rose to $3.9 billion, which is a 6%-increase.
• Dividends for shareholders rose by 11% and staff costs have fallen by 6%.
It is expected that Barclays Bank will be doing the same. Why wouldn’t they anyhow? The Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is going to try to get Brussels to reverse the cap on bonuses and so to all intents and purposes is defending the bankers.
It’s all about satisfiers and dissatisfiers. But, obviously, the general public has always been dissatisfied with the fact that bonuses are dished out by the banksters. The champagne drinkers were satisfied once (when they had a sense of what money meant and they actually might have done something to deserve it). ‘What satisfies today will become the source of dissatisfaction tomorrow’ has never been more resounding than when it concerns bankers and the financial sector. Why does everyone keep on harping on about why the bankers get silly money that only you and I can see in the newspapers? The bankers got given ridiculous sums. Ridiculous became absurd and absurd turned into harebrained simply because they were constantly dissatisfied by the amounts that were being given to them. Neither the European Union nor the governments of any of our super-rich (virtual) and yet desperately-and-critically-in-debt countries will ever be able to stop the bankers from getting their gelastic bonuses.
Originally posted: Bank Bonus Bonanza
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