GUEST COMMENT: The real world will begrudge you your bonus and they will take it away
We stumbled along happily for years, us masters of the universe.
The flat turned into a house and the house into a mansion. The girlfriend became the wife, the extra bedrooms filled with three or four children. The Porsche became a Volvo and the mini-breaks became the Friday night crawl to the cottage in the country.
We even put up with the Chancellor taking 50% of the pie rather than the 40%. We knew that our non-City friends quietly resented the amount we were earning, but the reflected glory and the odd trip to the Tuscan villa cushioned the blow of how "crowded out" our ilk made them feel.
Then, far away, in the vain search for yield in a low return world, somebody hit upon the idea of selling "Billy-Bob" the house that his family had rented for years...even though he couldn't really afford it. Thus were sown the seeds of the Triffid that forces its way up between the cracks in the pavement of our society and causes us to front out the resentment we read in the faces of newly- introduced people at dinner parties.
Privately, at "City only" soirees (which I find increasingly prevalent) the wives bemoan the fall in standing of our (and often their) chosen profession. As the evening wears on, the calls for the beatification of Bob Diamond for his "remorse needs to be over" speech become shriller and louder.
Around midnight with lots of fine claret onboard, you half expect the assembled throng to spill onto the streets and storm up the hill to the Hampstead bastion of our leftwing liberal arts antagonists. Yet no. For theirs is, both literally and figuratively, the higher ground. As we survey the battleground from the lowlands of The Royal Borough, we understand that we have lost control of the battlefield.
Once-upon-a-time, when money talked and everybody else walked, the City would brazen out every misdemeanour and carry on regardless; usually with the self interested connivance of our elected representatives.
But now, they seek to take away the only thing that we put in the marriage breaking hours to achieve: the cash. This leaves us asking ourselves a question which is a little too poignant: "What's the point?"
I fear that the answer to this rather difficult conundrum is simple; get over it or get out.
We all know that most of us had no hand giving Billy-Bob a mortgage or trading the three letter acronym that was the result. But we also know that the resultant hiatus in the money markets and the following meltdown of the wider economy changed the City's remuneration landscape forever.
The siren calls to "bash a banker" are not going away. We're just too easy a target.
They tried the "Bonus Tax" last year: failure.
They tried the "not too much cash" this year: jury's out, but I suspect qualified failure.
What's next? No cash? Paying back salaries? No bonus at all & an earnings cap? Lien against my assets?
I don't know.
But whilst we remain as social pariahs and the politicians score easy sound-bites against us, I wouldn't bet against them....
The author is a senior trader with long experience of working in London.
