Bankers Continue to Feast

While pay for workers who actually contribute to society, public service and manufacturing is cut back, pay at Europe’s four largest investment banks rose by a total of nearly £2.4bn ($3.8bn) in 2010, as more employees were taken on and fixed salaries largely wiped out any savings from lower bonuses. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/da9928a8-3abc-11e0-9c1a-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss&ftcamp=crm/email/2011218/nbe/GlobalBusiness/product#axzz1EIGDkmwY

Pay and benefit expenses jumped more than 20 per cent within the investment banking divisions of both Barclays and UBS. Within Deutsche Bank’s corporate and investment banking arm, pay rose to €5.9bn ($8bn) in 2010, up 17 per cent from 2009. The results reveal that European investment banks, like their US peers, have not yet significantly reined in pay.

At both UBS and Credit Suisse, costs ate up about 80 per cent of investment banking revenues in 2010, Barclays Capital saw its cost-to-income ratio climb to 65 per cent last year, at the top end of its own internal forecasts, while Deutsche’s 69 per cent ratio was 2 percentage points higher than in 2009.

This means more money has been creamed off by the bankers than is going to share owners, who are our pension funds and ultimately us. So while we have pay cuts and attacks on our pensions to pay back the debts the government raised to rescue the banks, the bankers take the lion share of income!