Jottings

RBS Says Defections Cost Bank 1 Billion Pounds in Lost Profit – Bloomberg.com By Gavin Finch

Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) — Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc Chief Executive Officer Stephen Hester said the departure of about 1,000 top investment bankers over bonuses cost the lender as much as 1 billion pounds ($1.5 billion) in lost earnings.

“We could easily have made across the bank perhaps as much as 1 billion pounds more of profit if we hadn’t lost people,” Hester said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. The number of top-ranked employees who left the bank doubled last year to about 1000 people, he said.

RBS will pay its investment bankers about 1.3 billion pounds in bonuses, compared with about 900 million pounds for the previous year

So, for all the sorrys that were said, the lessons that were supposed to be learned – and more importantly the money we spent on them the bankers seem to be carrying on as before.

The excuse for the bonuses – well if they weren’t paid then those people would go elsewhere and the bankers couldn’t make all that profit.  That’s the profit that they aren’t using to repay the money we paid to get them out of the mess they got into.

We need a radical rework of our banking system – one we take out the risk, increase the loans and where people are paid for their talent and no more.

I wonder if Metro Bank is the way forward ….

bank, politics, metro bank, banking