Last week we were told that Goldman Sachs is cutting pay and benefits by 20%.
Today’s FT says bonuses for investment bankers at Barclays are for the chop.
If true, this development will be highly popular with everyone apart from bankers.
The trouble is, I’ve read these stories before, many times. And when the real numbers come out, they don’t really back up the hypothesis.
They end up looking like PR efforts by banks to pretend they are doing the right thing, rather than real attempts to rein in salaries everyone, apart from bankers, think are absurd in the first place.
PR firms put out surveys on such matters fairly often.
The trouble is, they always turn out to be based on interviews with 50 disgruntled bankers who didn’t get a bonus this year and the spouses furious they are being limited to just two weeks in the Dordogne.
For the CEOs and his top staff, it’s still laugh-all-the-way to the Aston Martin dealership time, regardless of share price performance.
A properly comprehensive piece of research on banker pay would play well just now.
Which bits of the City aren’t paying like they used to? Why?
