Where's the rescue plan for the banks' unwanted human capital? Try this rehabilitation package
- The Guardian,
- Saturday October 11 2008
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For the first time for a long time the masters of the universe, our big banking friends, are finding that the universe is actually a cold, dark and generally inhospitable place. The government has very kindly bailed out the banks, but not much thought has been given to the bankers themselves. Fortunately I have given this a great deal of thought and have worked out a rescue plan for these individuals which will guarantee long-term growth for them personally.
The first thing I did was some simple maths. I stress simple as opposed to the highly complex maths that the masters of the universe did which came up with such brilliant algorithms as 0x1 =3. I have calculated that for the salary of one master of the universe you could pay for 200 bank clerks. Personal banking would be immeasurably improved by having real people involved, in the same way that policing would come on in leaps and bounds if it involved actual police where you needed them.
In my plan, everyone's current account would come with a clerk attached. This person would be your personal financial butler who would do everything for you stopping only slightly short of ironing your bank notes. They would be taught that their wages depended on your money and would very quickly become as interested in your financial health as you were. Getting money from a hole in the wall is very much like receiving your prison meal through a hole in your door. Much more satisfying would be a clerk in the window system, wherein a smiling official would sit behind a window and give you cash when you needed it. This would cut down substantially on chip and pin fraud as the clerk would ask for your mother's maiden name or, ideally, would actually know your mother.
Heartening though the sight of your own bank clerk waiting at the bus stop in the morning would be, it still leaves the problem of what to do with the redundant masters of the universe. My rescue plan sees fund managers reassigned as fund raisers. They would be in charge of jumble sales. Not once a year but every weekend. This would mean they would spend much of their working week collecting boxes of junk from people's garages and then delivering the junk back to different garages after it had been displayed all Saturday afternoon without selling. I know these guys are highly motivated and competitive so I would put them on performance-related pay. They will get 10% of the price they can get for the plastic baby doll with one arm. In this way they will get a new and finer appreciation of what it means to sell "junk".
As anyone with a useful trade will tell you, it's not easy to move from one trade to another. With this in mind I would keep hedge fund managers' job descriptions almost intact except for the letter "d". They would become a new business called Hedge Fun. As the name implies this would be a gardening and landscaping service with special emphasis on hedge and shrubbery maintenance. Having promised endless growth to their customers, they would now be in charge of controlling the only real source of endless growth, nature. Every hedge they trimmed would be a Promethean reminder of the limits of growth elsewhere.
I have given a lot of thought to short sellers. My immediate solution was to insist they wore shorts as a badge of honour for service to the community. But that would be short-changing them, which we wouldn't want to do as that would mean that we were no better than them. Short sellers are highly motivated and intelligent types who make their money spotting, encouraging and betting on failure. There are many roles open to this sort of person. One such would be an operative whose sole task would be informing people about personal failures such as their driving test, being dumped by their partner or contracting a terminal illness. The short seller would always be on hand to share the bad news. Their income would come from tips.
The heart of darkness of the current financial crisis is the nasty little derivatives that turned sow's ear mortgages into silk purse bonds. These perfectly married individual greed to corporate greed by removing the simple 1+1=2 equation from banking. Happily my plan will also help derivative traders. I estimate that there is about £1bn worth of coppers in circulation that no one's using. I think we should give all these coppers to the masters of the universe to help them out of their troubles, on the understanding that they count it. By hand. I am confident that by the time they've finished, if not before, they will have rediscovered the forgotten art of adding up.
• Guy Browning writes the How to column in Weekend magazine and is the author of Maps of My Life
The first thing I did was some simple maths. I stress simple as opposed to the highly complex maths that the masters of the universe did which came up with such brilliant algorithms as 0x1 =3. I have calculated that for the salary of one master of the universe you could pay for 200 bank clerks. Personal banking would be immeasurably improved by having real people involved, in the same way that policing would come on in leaps and bounds if it involved actual police where you needed them.
In my plan, everyone's current account would come with a clerk attached. This person would be your personal financial butler who would do everything for you stopping only slightly short of ironing your bank notes. They would be taught that their wages depended on your money and would very quickly become as interested in your financial health as you were. Getting money from a hole in the wall is very much like receiving your prison meal through a hole in your door. Much more satisfying would be a clerk in the window system, wherein a smiling official would sit behind a window and give you cash when you needed it. This would cut down substantially on chip and pin fraud as the clerk would ask for your mother's maiden name or, ideally, would actually know your mother.
Heartening though the sight of your own bank clerk waiting at the bus stop in the morning would be, it still leaves the problem of what to do with the redundant masters of the universe. My rescue plan sees fund managers reassigned as fund raisers. They would be in charge of jumble sales. Not once a year but every weekend. This would mean they would spend much of their working week collecting boxes of junk from people's garages and then delivering the junk back to different garages after it had been displayed all Saturday afternoon without selling. I know these guys are highly motivated and competitive so I would put them on performance-related pay. They will get 10% of the price they can get for the plastic baby doll with one arm. In this way they will get a new and finer appreciation of what it means to sell "junk".
As anyone with a useful trade will tell you, it's not easy to move from one trade to another. With this in mind I would keep hedge fund managers' job descriptions almost intact except for the letter "d". They would become a new business called Hedge Fun. As the name implies this would be a gardening and landscaping service with special emphasis on hedge and shrubbery maintenance. Having promised endless growth to their customers, they would now be in charge of controlling the only real source of endless growth, nature. Every hedge they trimmed would be a Promethean reminder of the limits of growth elsewhere.
I have given a lot of thought to short sellers. My immediate solution was to insist they wore shorts as a badge of honour for service to the community. But that would be short-changing them, which we wouldn't want to do as that would mean that we were no better than them. Short sellers are highly motivated and intelligent types who make their money spotting, encouraging and betting on failure. There are many roles open to this sort of person. One such would be an operative whose sole task would be informing people about personal failures such as their driving test, being dumped by their partner or contracting a terminal illness. The short seller would always be on hand to share the bad news. Their income would come from tips.
The heart of darkness of the current financial crisis is the nasty little derivatives that turned sow's ear mortgages into silk purse bonds. These perfectly married individual greed to corporate greed by removing the simple 1+1=2 equation from banking. Happily my plan will also help derivative traders. I estimate that there is about £1bn worth of coppers in circulation that no one's using. I think we should give all these coppers to the masters of the universe to help them out of their troubles, on the understanding that they count it. By hand. I am confident that by the time they've finished, if not before, they will have rediscovered the forgotten art of adding up.
• Guy Browning writes the How to column in Weekend magazine and is the author of Maps of My Life
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