New Greed Stalks Financial Neverland

However, how can they? When banks on both sides of the Atlantic have had to rely on government money for their survival, the idea of keeping the fat cats very plump is anathema not only to governments themselves, but also to ordinary Joes on the street whose pay may be on hold – if they have a job at all, that is.

President Obama looked pretty heated recently when he called for financial regulation – or else. And he wasn’t just referring to General Motors. Likewise in Britain when the government had to respond to limit the £700,000 (US$ 1,000,000) per year pension paid to former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin, despite him having presided over the bank’s pre-nationalised demise.

Some would argue that you’ll never keep the lid on Wall Street/FTSE chutzpah, and that has to be ‘A GOOD THING’ for the future of capitalism. And this is despite recent calls for a new paradigm in the financial sector. Unfortunately, Michael Douglas’ ‘Greed Is Good’ by-line sounds just a little sexier than ‘Let’s save for a better future’, worthy though that sentiment is.

Paying Citigroup staff bigger salaries to attract and keep the best quality employees may sound laudable in glass-fronted boardrooms. It may even have resonance in the UK Parliament where dozens of elected representatives have been caught with their hands in the till – ostensibly in the name of claiming ‘legitimate expenses’ that compensated for relatively low basic salaries.

In the midst of a recession where tumbleweed is rolling round the streets of Detroit and where youth unemployment is becoming endemic in Britain’s northern industrial towns, the kind of government-sponsored rewards we’re reading about could be sowing the seeds of a massive political backlash.

Written by Buzzwords Limited, which is run by Mike Beeson, a UK-based copywriting agency providing a wide range of copywriting skills, search engine optimization (SEO) and PR services.