TOPIC: Bankers 'Struggling' To Live On £500,000-A-Year

Many bankers have been struggling to keep up their standard of living on salaries as high as £500,000-a-year due to their bonuses not increasing as quickly as they expected.

Richard Kingdon, an addiction counsellor based in the City of London, told the Huffington Post UK that the bankers would be struggling on £500,000-a-year as "they've got no common sense".

"People in the City are spending £50,000 on a weekend with prostitutes, gambling, and cocaine so why wouldn't they get into trouble? A lot of them have taken big hits because they've not got their bonuses. A lot of them are pissed off."

A head of HR at one British bank told efinancialcareers.com, speaking anonymously: “Our mid-ranking people are struggling. If you’re earning less than £500k, it’s very difficult to buy a house in central London and to pay school fees for several children."

Kingdon, who works at City Beacon, told HuffPostUK: "Many of my clients have no qualms about spending twenty to thirty grand on holidays, cars, designer clothes and much more on school fees."

Bankers enjoyed a bonus pool of nearly £4 billion in April, marketing an 82.2% rise (£1.857 billion) over last year, according to official data from the Office for National Statistics. George Osborne has launched a legal challenge against an EU bank bonus cap, with the Bank of England concerned that it could breach some bankers' human rights.

One banker complained: “My guy who borrowed £750k has seen his compensation coming down year-after-year. It’s very hard for him – he’s spending a significant proportion of his income servicing that debt.

Bankers working in the City of London on £500,000 would be earning nearly 20 times the average UK salary of £26,000. The UK has more millionaire bankers than the rest of the EU combined.

The concern about mid-ranking bankers suffering on just £500,000 comes as the chancellor tried to help the Royal Bank of Scotland dodge a £471,000 salary cap. By comparison, new RBS chief executive Ross McEwan gets an annual salary of £1 million-a-year.

You know when I was a first year apprentice painter I struggled to get by on $11 an hour despite that being about $4 above minimum wage. I still struggle as a journeyman making double that pay. If you are getting 5000 a week you get more bills to pay. Capitalism just works that way. Mortgage is more, car payments etc all cost more and if you live in a richer area the cost of living in that area is higher.

Chuck that is the problem, you are associating the action and the man. By saying that person is inextricably intertwined with their action, you are denying the possibility of education, and as such socialism.The tribal view of these people on my side those people bad is in many ways the largest impediment to the ends you seem to wish for.

To use your analogy; we are not talking about the owners, but is it not more like we are in the field and blaming the house slaves.

We are pretty much all playing the game but some of us have better cards. There are rich people who use their money for "good" but it could be argued that since they are still playing that game then to hell with them. But where does that leave us and what is the answer?

jonb wrote:
Well yes perhaps the trustees/kapos. Or, to borrow a phrase from Ward Churchill, "little Eichmanns".

Kingdon, who works at City Beacon, told HuffPostUK: "Many of my clients have no qualms about spending twenty to thirty grand on holidays, cars, designer clothes and much more on school fees."

I disagree that the solution to capitalism is more capitalism, purer and more directly to the vein.

Ultimate Seeker ™ wrote:
Of course you wouldn't agree because you support the Marxist Federal Europe which sees people as a harmonised mass of meat and bones making up a human resource to exploit and rule over.

Capitalism as it has been engineered is not a free market it's a manipulated market which is free to a privilege few to exploit. An organic free market wouldn't be open to exploitation because the manipulative elements would be removed and businesses would be competing on a level field.

Ultimate Seeker ™ wrote:
Of course you wouldn't agree because you support the Marxist Federal Europe which sees people as a harmonised mass of meat and bones making up a human resource to exploit and rule over. Capitalism as it has been engineered is not a free market it's a manipulated market which is free to a privilege few to exploit. An organic free market wouldn't be open to exploitation because the manipulative elements would be removed and businesses would be competing on a level field. People should be directly responsible for their own actions and the local community around them, which will ripple out to the wider community. People don't need control systems we simply need a just and fair society to operate in nothing more and nothing less!

The problem for me is that we tie the debate to be trapped between two opposing camps forcing a choice, either the individual is subsumed into a community where the importance is seen that the individual must contort themselves to fit to the common good, or no community at all just individuals fighting each other for personal advancement.
To me either of these alternates are a bleak prospects, and in truth neither of these extremes is ever going to be workable, because simply humans don't behave that way.

Member States and their citizens want to ensure that the financial sector makes a fair and substantial contribution to public finances. Moreover, the sector should pay back at least part of what the European tax payers have pre-financed in the context of the bank rescue operations

The European Union has called on Switzerland to agree to swift and unconditional negotiations on the introduction of an automatic exchange of banking information – doing away with banking secrecy to crack down on tax evasion by foreign asset holders.

“It is widely accepted that the era of banking secrecy is over. Resisting the clear international trends for more transparency and information sharing is pointless,” EU tax commissioner Algirdas Semeta told journalists following talks with Swiss finance minister, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, in the Bern on Monday.