Showing posts with label casino. Show all posts
Showing posts with label casino. Show all posts
Thursday 18 March 2021
Wednesday 17 March 2021
Sunday 12 January 2014
Powerful lobbyists and fawning ministers are corroding society
The lack of regulation and legislation for which wealthy lobbyists press is mostly a form of welfare for big business
The UK drinks industry lobbied vigorously against a minimum price. Photograph: Johnny Green/PA
It was a classic exchange. Neil Goulden, chair of the Association of British Bookmakers, did his best to defend the indefensible. We must place the problem of addictive fixed-odds betting machines in context, he told Radio 4's Today programme last week. They constitute only a small part of the industry's total revenues; there are very few problem gamblers. Britain has the best regulated and most socially responsible gaming industry in the world. Obviously voluntary efforts, which had already achieved much, needed to go further. But there was no need for more intervention.
Later, in the House of Commons, the prime minister, keenly aware that Ed Miliband has thrived when combining the cost of living crisis with example after example of predatory capitalism, was not going to allow himself to be painted as the friend of the betting and casino industries. But equally, he had to keep alive his deep conviction that regulation, always " burdensome", should be avoided as a matter of principle and, if conceded, kept as minimal as possible.
Yes, he understood the leader of the opposition's concern that ordinary high-street betting shops were being turned into mini-casinos via these machines and were proliferating in some of the most deprived parts of the country. But a "review", he claimed, of unspecified provenance was under way. There was no need to support the Labour party's proposals. The issue was kicked into the long grass.
Last week witnessed a procession of examples where successive industries demonstrated their unnerving and effective capacity to block efforts at making them work more in the social and public interest. The British Medical Journal revealed in a powerful article that the UK drinks industry had enjoyed no fewer than 130 meetings with ministers in the run-up to last July's abandonment of the commitment to set a minimum price of 40p for an unit of alcohol. The evidence from Sheffield University's alcohol research department is unambiguous: the higher the price, the less is consumed, lowering crime and death rates alike.
Yet purposeful intervention even for these high stakes is not what Conservative ministers or rightwing thinktanks believe in. Better a world of voluntary codes of practice and forums promoting responsibility than anything with teeth that might "burden" business or – shedding crocodile tears – "penalise the poor". Indeed, it was in precisely those terms that the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, discussed minimum alcohol pricing with Asda chief executive, Andy Clarke. In case we were in any doubt, the public health minister, Jane Ellison, spelled out the Conservative position, preferring a " collaborative approach on public health" in a "voluntary way" in which business is a "partner".
Collaboration, voluntary, partnership and social responsibility are good words. Regulation, legislation, quotas and tax are bad words, for, it is alleged, these are just the sort of things to raise prices and disadvantage hard-pressed consumers. Thus already the sugar industry, confronting the newly created Action on Sugar Campaign to lower the sugar content in food, is reaching for the same Goulden armament. British housebuilders, fighting off proposals to landscape new developments so that rainwater runs off naturally, plead that house prices will rise as a result, and thus four years after the 2010 Flood Defence Act, requiring such development to improve our much-depleted flood defences, there is still no agreement.
Part of the problem is that in the indiscriminate drive to create a smaller government, the Department of the Environment, reeling from cuts, has not the manpower to follow through on legislation. But the problem is made worse because the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, believes, like Jeremy Hunt at health and many other colleagues, that essentially their job is to do whatever business says.
Obviously in a capitalist economy, private business is a principal driver of growth. Great entrepreneurship in action is fabulous, but crucially it never emerges from private action alone. There is always some pubic agency involved in, and often leading, the risk-taking. Yet the fiction of our times is that all business is entrepreneurial, all business aims to behave well, all business accepts that it should pay the social costs of its activities and that any effort to shape business activity is counterproductive. These are the propositions that underpin the stance of the business lobbyist – and of the minister welcoming him or her. The public, if it only knew, would surely despair.
The lack of regulation and legislation for which the business lobbyists press is rarely to support entrepreneurship; in most instances, it is a sophisticated form of corporate welfare. It will not be British bookmakers who pick up the costs of addictive gambling in welfare bills and housing benefit; no drinks company will foot the NHS's bill for alcohol-related illness or police bill for crime; no sugar company the bill for obesity. Housebuilders will cheerfully direct rainwater cheaply into the sewerage system and the water companies will then raise water charges and expect state guarantees for improving the system.
The deal is clear: pass on the maximum cost to the state, minimise one's own obligations including tax payments, and insist anything else will cost jobs and penalise consumers. Corporate welfare works. Bookmaker William Hill, for example, declares £293m profit on a turnover of £1.3bn, and pays a mere £48m in tax. Drinks multinational Diageo pays £66m of UK tax on its £1.75 bn of UK turnover. Executive pay is stunning; indeed, it even provoked a shareholder revolt at William Hill last year.
The low regulation lobby is in effect creating high-return, low-risk business fiefdoms largely free of social and public obligations. Worse, shareholders and investors set these returns against what they might expect investing in frontier technologies and innovation. Why do that when you can make more certain and higher profits in pay-day lending, bookmaking or the drinks business? The Cameron-Osborne-Hunt-Paterson mantra leads straight to a low innovation economy and a high-stress, low-wellbeing society, while offering unnecessarily high returns to those at the top.
Reality is very different. Business is part of the society in which it trades. Regulation and legislation, far from burdens, are crucial grit in the capitalist oyster. They are proposed in our democracy because they will reduce public and social costs that otherwise society has to bear. By obliging business to accept the costs it creates, it raises genuine innovation. It is time to call time. We don't want ministers acting as surrogate corporate lobbyists. We need them to fashion a new compact between business and society.
Wednesday 17 October 2012
Bullying Interns the Goldman Sachs way
Back on 12 June 2000, as the dot-com bubble was deflating, young Greg
Smith was all puffed up, clutching his "extra-large coffee" and looking
up "at the formidable tower that housed Goldman Sach's equities trading
headquarters" in New York. "Holy shit," he thought, as he arrived for
the first day of his summer internship at the Wall Street bank.
More than a decade later, on 14 March 2012, not long after a
different financial bubble had burst, the remark may well have risen in a
hush over the Goldman dealing room as wide-eyed traders poured over an
opinion piece in The New York Times. Title? "Why I'm Leaving Goldman
Sachs". Author? Greg Smith. "Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs," Mr
Smith proclaimed. Over 12 years, he said, he had understood what made
the bank tick. "And I can honestly say that the environment is now as
toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it."
Now, Mr Smith, who had risen to become a Goldman executive director and head of the firm's US equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa before quitting, is preparing tell us the full story. According to reports, his biting commentary on Goldman won him a book deal and a cool $1.5m (£930,000) advance, with the product of his labours, imaginatively titled Why I Left Goldman Sachs, set to hit the shelves on 22 October. The night before, he is reported to be planning to break his self-imposed hiatus from the public square with a US television interview. Ahead of the launch, Goldman yesterday said it had conducted a detailed review of Mr Smith's claims and found no evidence to support them.
But as we near the release date, it seems the firm's President Gary Cohn, who along with chief executive Lloyd Blankfein merited special mention in Mr Smith's op-ed for losing "hold of the firm's culture on their watch", is likely to be among those waiting in line for a copy of the tome. "I probably will read it," he said during an interview on Bloomberg television earlier this month. If Mr Cohn wants an early look, the first chapter was released on the Apple iBookstore this week. Titled "I Don't Know, But I'll Find Out", it offers a glimpse of Mr Smith's first days in the belly of the "great vampire squid", as the bank was memorably dubbed by Rolling Stone.
Back then Mr Smith was a dedicated convert to the Goldman cause. That summer's day, the 21-year-old had no premonition of what – in his view – Goldman would become, and how he would go on to feel. Young Mr Smith, then on a scholarship at Stanford, was, to his mind, justifiably proud. "The selection process for any type of job at Goldman Sachs is extremely rigorous. On average, only one in 45 people... who apply for a summer internship, or a full-time job, get an offer," he says. To get ahead, he'd prepped hard for the interview. "I'd read The Culture of Success, a history of the firm by Lisa Endlich, a former Goldman VP," he reveals. Who doesn't, right?
With a toe in the door, Mr Smith was issued with a folding stool and a "big orange ID badge" on a "bright orange lanyard" – status markers to remind an intern that he or she was mere "plebe, a newbie, a punk-kid". "It was innately demeaning," he says, recounting how interns had to carry around the stools "at all times because there were no extra chairs at the trading desks".
The internship itself was demanding. "You came to work at 5:45 or 6:00 or 6:30 in the morning," Mr Smith recalls. Goldman interns were put through two "Open Meetings" a week, where "a partner would stand at the front of the room with a list of names and call on people at will with questions on the firm's storied culture, its history, on the stock market".
"Depending on the personal style of the people in charge, the meetings could be brutal. They were always intense," Mr Smith says, recalling how, on one occasion, an intern was rebuked by a VP for not knowing enough about Goldman's stance on Microsoft shares. "What is our price target? What are the catalysts coming up? How has the stock been trading? Come on," said VP barks, according to the account. The hapless intern "starts to tear up and runs out of the room".
Smith also recalls the treatment handed out to an intern after a managing director ordered a cheddar cheese sandwich and was presented with a cheddar cheese salad. The boss "opened the container, looked at the salad, looked up at the kid, closed the container and threw it in the trash". "It was a bit harsh, but it was also a teaching moment," Mr Smith writes.
The anecdotes chime with the caricature of Wall Street as a laddish jungle where ritual hazing is just part of doing business. But at this early stage there is none of the greed that Mr Smith spoke of in his op-ed – he claimed, for instance, that people in the firm "callously talk about ripping their clients off". Instead, the gruelling intern routine is presented as a way of training new initiates to be "truthful, resourceful, collaborative".
Tantalisingly, though, Chapter 5 is titled "Welcome to the Casino".
Now, Mr Smith, who had risen to become a Goldman executive director and head of the firm's US equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa before quitting, is preparing tell us the full story. According to reports, his biting commentary on Goldman won him a book deal and a cool $1.5m (£930,000) advance, with the product of his labours, imaginatively titled Why I Left Goldman Sachs, set to hit the shelves on 22 October. The night before, he is reported to be planning to break his self-imposed hiatus from the public square with a US television interview. Ahead of the launch, Goldman yesterday said it had conducted a detailed review of Mr Smith's claims and found no evidence to support them.
But as we near the release date, it seems the firm's President Gary Cohn, who along with chief executive Lloyd Blankfein merited special mention in Mr Smith's op-ed for losing "hold of the firm's culture on their watch", is likely to be among those waiting in line for a copy of the tome. "I probably will read it," he said during an interview on Bloomberg television earlier this month. If Mr Cohn wants an early look, the first chapter was released on the Apple iBookstore this week. Titled "I Don't Know, But I'll Find Out", it offers a glimpse of Mr Smith's first days in the belly of the "great vampire squid", as the bank was memorably dubbed by Rolling Stone.
Back then Mr Smith was a dedicated convert to the Goldman cause. That summer's day, the 21-year-old had no premonition of what – in his view – Goldman would become, and how he would go on to feel. Young Mr Smith, then on a scholarship at Stanford, was, to his mind, justifiably proud. "The selection process for any type of job at Goldman Sachs is extremely rigorous. On average, only one in 45 people... who apply for a summer internship, or a full-time job, get an offer," he says. To get ahead, he'd prepped hard for the interview. "I'd read The Culture of Success, a history of the firm by Lisa Endlich, a former Goldman VP," he reveals. Who doesn't, right?
With a toe in the door, Mr Smith was issued with a folding stool and a "big orange ID badge" on a "bright orange lanyard" – status markers to remind an intern that he or she was mere "plebe, a newbie, a punk-kid". "It was innately demeaning," he says, recounting how interns had to carry around the stools "at all times because there were no extra chairs at the trading desks".
The internship itself was demanding. "You came to work at 5:45 or 6:00 or 6:30 in the morning," Mr Smith recalls. Goldman interns were put through two "Open Meetings" a week, where "a partner would stand at the front of the room with a list of names and call on people at will with questions on the firm's storied culture, its history, on the stock market".
"Depending on the personal style of the people in charge, the meetings could be brutal. They were always intense," Mr Smith says, recalling how, on one occasion, an intern was rebuked by a VP for not knowing enough about Goldman's stance on Microsoft shares. "What is our price target? What are the catalysts coming up? How has the stock been trading? Come on," said VP barks, according to the account. The hapless intern "starts to tear up and runs out of the room".
Smith also recalls the treatment handed out to an intern after a managing director ordered a cheddar cheese sandwich and was presented with a cheddar cheese salad. The boss "opened the container, looked at the salad, looked up at the kid, closed the container and threw it in the trash". "It was a bit harsh, but it was also a teaching moment," Mr Smith writes.
The anecdotes chime with the caricature of Wall Street as a laddish jungle where ritual hazing is just part of doing business. But at this early stage there is none of the greed that Mr Smith spoke of in his op-ed – he claimed, for instance, that people in the firm "callously talk about ripping their clients off". Instead, the gruelling intern routine is presented as a way of training new initiates to be "truthful, resourceful, collaborative".
Tantalisingly, though, Chapter 5 is titled "Welcome to the Casino".
Sunday 30 September 2012
We need a revolution in how our companies are owned and run
The second of this series on a new capitalism calls for a culture dedicated to long-term, ethical goals
Rolls Royce: almost our last remaining great industrial company. Photograph: Simon Stuart-Miller/guardian.co.uk
Twenty years ago, Britain's greatest industrial companies were ICI and GEC. A third, Rolls-Royce, secured from hostile takeover by a government golden share, had a board that was boringly committed to research and development and to investing in its business. ICI and GEC, under colossal pressure from footloose shareholders to deliver high short-term profits, tried to wheel and deal their way to success. Neither now exists. Rolls Royce, free from concerns about hourly movements in its share price, has gone on to be almost our last remaining great industrial company.
Britain, as the Kay review on the equity markets reported, has far too few Rolls-Royces. Instead the report identified a lengthening list of companies – Marks and Spencer, Royal Bank of Scotland, BP, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds and now BAE – which have made grave strategic errors, taken ethical short cuts or launched ill-judged takeovers, hoping to benefit their uncommitted tourist shareholders. Their competitors in other countries, with different ownership structures and incentives, have survived and prospered.
It is an unreported crisis of ownership that goes to the heart of our current ills. Over the last decade, a fifth of quoted companies have evaporated from the London Stock Exchange, the largest cull in our history. Virtually no new risk capital is sought from the stock market or being offered across the spectrum of companies. A share is now held for an average of seven months. Britain has no indigenous quoted company in the fields of car, chemical or building materials. They are all owned overseas, with design and research and development travelling abroad as well.
The stock market has descended into a casino, served by a vast industry of intermediaries – agents, trustees, investment managers, registrars and advisers of all sorts – who have grown fat from opaque fees. It has become a transmission mechanism for highly short-term expectations of profit driven into the boardroom. Directors' pay has been linked to share price performance, offering them the prospect of stunning fortunes. As a result, R&D is consistently undervalued.
British companies are now hoarding some £800bn in cash, cash they would rather use buying back their own shares than committing to investment. We have allowed a madhouse to develop. An important reason why Britain is at the bottom of the league table for investment and innovation is the way our companies are owned or, rather, notowned.
It is a crisis of commitment. Too few shareholders are committed to the companies they allegedly "own". They consider their shares either casino chips to be traded in the immediate future or as no more than a contract offering the opportunity of dividends in certain industries and countries; this requires no engagement in how those profits and dividends are generated. British law and corporate governance rules demand the narrowest interpretation of investors' and directors' duties: to maximise short-term profits while having minimal associated responsibilities.
The company is conceived as nothing more than a network of short-term contracts. Any shareholder – from a transient day trader to a long-term investor – has the same standing in law. American directors' ability to defend their company from hostile takeover or German directors having to live – horrors – with trade union representatives on their supervisory boards are seen as obstacles to enterprise that Britain must not go near. But companies and wealth generation, as Professor Colin Mayer argues in his important forthcoming book Firm Commitment, are about co-creation, sharing risk and long-term trust relationships: Britain's refusal to embrace these core truths is toxic. Companies were originally invented as legal structures to enable groups of investors to come together, committing to share risk around a shared goal and so make profit for themselves, but delivering wider economic and social benefits in the process. Incorporation was understood to be associated with obligations: a company had to declare its purpose before earning a licence to trade. There existed a mutual deal between society and company.
No game-changing improvement in British investment and innovation is possible without a return to engagement, stewardship and commitment. Limited liability should not be a charter to do what you like. It must be conditional on a core business purpose, along with the creation of trustees to guard it. Directors' obligations should be legally redefined to deliver on this purpose. What's more, every shareholder should be required to vote, with voting strength, as Mayer argues, increasing for the number of years the share is held.
To solve the problem that individual shareholders – even savings institutions – do not have sufficient muscle nor sufficient incentive to engage with managements, voting rights could be aggregated and given to new mutuals. These would support directors in delivering their corporate purpose, a proposal made by the Ownership Commission I chaired. Companies would become trust companies, with a stewardship code. The priority in takeovers would be the best future for the business, not the ambition to please the last hedge fund to take a short-term position.
Stakeholders should also have a voice in how the company is run. In Germany, a company's bankers and its employee representatives have seats on the supervisory board. Why not copy success rather than continue with our failed system? The Kay review's proposals to stop quarterly profit reporting, while a useful first step, do not address the core of the problem. The company has become a dysfunctional organisational construct that needs root-and-branch reform.
As part of the reform, Britain also needs more co-operatives, more employee-owned companies and more family-owned firms. It needs to be more attentive to which foreign companies own our assets and for what purpose. It is an ownership revolution to match the revolution in finance proposed last week. Together with an innovation revolution – see next week – the British economy could at last begin to deliver its promise.
Sunday 22 July 2012
The American election is really a battle for the future of capitalism
Mitt Romney embodies a system dominated by financial engineering that uses companies as casino chips
US President Barack Obama's version of capitalism is the way forward for Britain too. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
'Look, if you've been successful, you did not get there on your own. When we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative but also because we do things together." So said President Obama, campaigning in Roanoke Virginia, last week. He went on: "If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help".
He listed great teachers, government research, roads and bridges and the whole fabric of the American system as various ways in which "somebody along the line" would have contributed to your success. This was the essence of the social liberalism of the great British thinker Leonard Hobhouse, but now championed by an American president. Hobhouse passionately argued that capitalist wealth was co-created by the interaction of society, social capital and the entrepreneur. Government investment, financed properly by taxation, was the precondition for a successful capitalism.
Fox News, self-appointed 21st-century American custodian of free-enterprise capitalism, rather as Pravda guarded communism, was on to the issue like a flash. In my New York hotel, I watched an overheated Fox commentator begin railing about socialism and before long Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took up Fox News' cue as is mandatory for any Republican politician. The speech really "reveals what he [Mr Obama] thinks about our country, about free enterprise, about individual initiative, about America," he declared. "Did you build your business? If you did, raise your hand." Hands, pre-arranged, shot up. "Take that, Mr President," he finished.
The slowest and most faltering economic recovery since the Second World War was already triggering anxious questions about how to regain American economic dynamism, but Romney's presidential candidacy has crystallised a fundamental debate about capitalism that will spill over into Britain. It is a potential turning point in both countries. For Romney, whose fortune was made at Bain Capital, the private equity company he co-founded, owned and ran, embodies all the ills (or strengths, if you are so-minded) of a capitalism dominated by financial engineering, with companies as casino chips. It proved Romney's downfall when challenging Ted Kennedy in the race for the Senate in Massachusetts in 1994. The Democrats are determined to make it his downfall a second time round. Bain Capital was, and is, a quintessential product of the 25-year boom in credit and asset prices that began in the early 1980s. Mr Romney spotted the opportunity. He would raise money from private investors, saying the aim was to deploy Bain's consultancy techniques on pre-established companies carefully bought for their turn-round potential. This, coupled with significant leverage, would guarantee sky-high financial returns, not least for Romney.
The public understands that if you finance buying a house with a bank providing 90% of the asking price, and the house doubles in value, then your own 10% stake multiples elevenfold. Romney would apply the same logic not to the wealth-generating activity of starting innovative companies but to buying existing companies. Banks were only too keen to lend vast sums of money for such schemes, as they did right up to the financial crash in 2008. The companies' own profits would service Bain's debt.
Bain Capital would make the company more valuable – taking production offshore to low-cost countries, selling off redundant land, slashing research and investment budgets. And the general rise in property prices would help matters still more. When the companies' profits had risen, they would then be floated on the stock market for a much higher price and, hey presto, everybody got very rich.
Private equity has always been controversial. A few mature and poorly managed companies have benefited from the private equity treatment, but it became a huge industry dedicated to deal-making, extravagant leverage and self-enrichment, leaving a trail of disasters in its wake. In Britain, EMI has been emasculated by Guy Hands'sprivate equity fund and now looks likely to be swallowed up by Universal. American journalist Josh Kosman in The Buyout of America writes that many of the companies in the biggest PE deals in the 1990s fared worse than had the taken-over companies stayed independent. He identifies five companies – Stage Store, American Pad and Paper, GS Industries, Dade Behring and Details, all of which paid lavish dividends and fees to Bain before filing for bankruptcy.
For private equity is not at core about creating value through innovation and investment. That would need private equity owners to take another risk (the results from innovation are uncertain) on top of the leverage risk, hardly the point of the deal. Instead, the overriding requirement is to fatten up the company so it can be resold on the public markets to deliver great capital profits, just as Obama says.
Bain Capital is part of the problem, not the solution. The private equity recipe has ripped the heart out of innovative US while leaving its banks encumbered by massive non-performing debts. The business model is now broken and the US has to start to ask questions about whether the Bain type of allegedly individualist capitalism really delivers growth and jobs. As the answer is: no, what does?
Obama has begun the counter-argument. Innovation is necessarily about taking risks and unless there are mechanisms to share them between the private and public sectors, the risks and innovation are necessarily not undertaken. "The internet didn't get invented on its own," Obama argued. "Government research created the internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet."
He could have gone much further. The same is true of industries ranging from aerospace to pharmaceuticals. The whole ecosystem in which innovation is housed – patents, copyright, finance, universities, research, knowledge transfer, ownership rules, regulation to ensure common standards – is co-created between the public and the private. Innovative entrepreneurs and companies are in a continuous trial-and-error relationship with their customers, suppliers and outsiders, not isolated in an individualistic silo.
The Fox News charge that this is socialism is bewildering and dangerous nonsense. Anglo-American capitalism, mired in debt, low investment and out-innovated by its competitors in Asia and Germany, is at a crossroads. What is clearer than ever is that the conservatives' response is dumb. If Obama and the Democrats can beat them in the US it will have global ramifications – a chance to recognise what really makes good capitalism work. At last, it is game on.
Monday 13 February 2012
The true value of money – or why you can't fart a crashing plane back into the sky
Banknotes aren't worth the paper they're printed on. The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief
I'm no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is and I'll emit an unbroken 10-minute "um" through the clueless face of a broken puppet. You might as well ask a pantomime horse. But even an idiot such as me can see that money, as a whole, doesn't really seem to be working any more.
Money is broken, and until we admit that, any attempts to fix the economy seem doomed to fail. We're like passengers on a nosediving plane thinking if we all fart hard enough, we can lift it back into the sky. So should we be storming the cockpit or hunting for parachutes instead? I don't know: I ran out of metaphor after the fart gag. You're on your own from hereon in.
Banknotes aren't worth the paper they're printed on. If they were, they'd all have identical value. Money's only worth what the City thinks it's worth. Or, perhaps more accurately, hopes it's worth. Coins should really be called "wish-discs" instead. That name alone would give a truer sense of their value than the speculative number embossed on them.
The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story, or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. It's certainly nowhere near as well thought-out and executed.
No one really understands how it all works: if they did, we wouldn't be in this mess. Banking, as far as I can tell, seems to be almost as precise a science as using a slot machine. You either blindly hope for the best, delude yourself into thinking you've worked out a system, or open it up when no one's looking and rig the settings so it'll pay out illegally.
The chief difference is that slot machines are more familiar and graspable to most of us. When you hear a jackpot being paid out to a gambler, the robotic clunk-clunk-clunk of coin-on-tray, you're aware that he had to go to some kind of effort to get his reward. You know he stood there pushing buttons for hours. You can picture that.
The recent outrage over City bonuses stems from a combination of two factors: the sheer size of the numbers involved coupled with a lack of respect for the work involved in earning them. Like bankers, top footballers are massively overpaid, but at least you comprehend what they're doing for the money. If Wayne Rooney was paid millions to play lacrosse in a closed room in pitch darkness, people would begrudge him his millions far more than they already do. Instead there he is, on live television: he's skilled, no doubt about it.
Similarly, it may be tasteless when a rapper pops up on MTV wearing so much bling he might as well have dipped himself in glue and jumped into a treasure chest full of vajazzling crystals, but at least you understand how he earned it.
RBS boss Stephen Hester, meanwhile, earns more than a million pounds for performing enigmatic actions behind the scenes at a publicly owned bank. And on top of his huge wage, he was in line for a massive bonus. To most people, that's downright cheeky: like a man getting a blowjob from your spouse while asking you to make him a cup of tea.
But Hester earned his wage, we're told, because he does an incredibly difficult job. And maybe he does. Trouble is, no one outside the City understands what his job actually consists of. I find it almost impossible to picture a day in Hester's life, and I once wrote a short story about a pint-sized toy Womble that ran around killing dogs with its dick, so I know I don't lack imagination. Class, yes: imagination, no. If I strain my mind's eye, I can just about picture Hester arriving at work, picture him thanking his driver, picture the receptionist saying "Hello, Mr Hester", and picture him striding confidently into his office – but the moment the door shuts, my feed breaks up and goes fuzzy. What does he do in there? Pull levers? Chase numbers round the room with a broom? God knows.
Maybe if all bankers were forced to work in public, on the pavement, it would help us understand what they actually do. Of course, you'd have to encase them in a Perspex box so they wouldn't be attacked. In fact, if the experience of David Blaine is anything to go by, you'd have to quickly move that Perspex box to somewhere impossibly high up, where people can't pelt it with golf balls and tangerines. On top of the Gherkin, say. If Hester did his job inside a Perspex box on top of the Gherkin for a year, this entire argument might never have happened.
The row over bonuses has led some to mutter darkly about mob rule and the rise of anti-business sentiment. Complain about mobs all you like, but you can't control gut reactions, and you can't dictate the mood. And when you try to fart a crashing plane back into the sky, you only succeed in making the atmosphere unpleasant for everyone. And spoiling the in-flight movie. And making the stewardess cry. Looks like I'm all out of metaphor again. Time to end the article. Article ends.
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