There are a lot of articles around saying how scandalous the behaviour of bankers has been. This is one of the better ones.
There is a massive barrier to entry into banking, erected largely by the FSA and similar regulatory agencies around the world. Although bankers complain in public about these agencies, in private they congratulate themselves and their politician stooges for enacting the legislation that give rise to these agencies. Ostensibly these agencies exist to protect the public. In practice they exist to make it prohibitively expensive for entrepreneurs to start up new banks and break into the industry.
The result of this barrier to entry is supranormal profits. Profits beyond the normal costs, including the cost of capital. These supranormal profits accrue to the scarce resource. Normally this would be the shareholders, the owners. Increasingly these are not rewarded, because the gatekeepers to these profits are the managers. In theory the board is the agent of the shareholders, but since they face essentially no incentive to provide more return than shareholders can get investing in other similarly risky assets, the residue is kept by them.
Financing costs for banks are in any case much lower than any other firm because of their special relationship with the central bank, and because savers have few choices when it comes to finding an investment that guarantees (courtesy of the government) a full return of capital.
Sadly the only solution to this problem of excess rewards to bank boards is to treat banks no differently to other enterprises, as described here. Unfortunately our leaders, and the population as a whole, have been mesmerized, to use the apposite word coined by Simon Jenkins, into thinking that such an approach to regulating banks would be suicidally reckless.
Until we resolve the problem of the power of the bankers we are, I fear, doomed to follow the exact path trodden by Japan, in the two decades since it's financial crisis of 1992.
