by ANDREW HALDANE
In 1989, the CEOs of the seven largest banks in the US earned an average of $2.8 million, almost a hundred times the annual income of the average US household. In the same year, the CEOs of the largest four UK banks earned £453,000, fifty times average UK household income. These are striking inequalities. Yet by 2007, at the height of the financial sector boom, CEO pay at the largest US banks had risen nearly tenfold to $26 million, more than five hundred times US household income, while among the UK’s largest banks it had risen by an almost identical factor to reach £4.3 million, 230 times UK household income in that year.
How do we make sense of these salary increases? Easily, in fact. During the go-go years, bank profits reached spectacular highs. Bank shareholders remunerated managers for delivering these riches; CEO pay grew almost exactly in line with shareholder returns. Reality then intervened. The heart-stopping global recession of the last few years was largely induced by financial sector excess. The long-term costs of the crisis are likely comfortably to exceed a year’s global income.
The continuing backlash against banking, as evidenced in popular protests on Wall Street and in the City of London, is a response not just to the fact that the world is poorer, as pre-crisis riches have turned to rags, but to the way these riches were privatised, while the rags are being socialised. This disparity is nothing new. Neither, in the main, is it anyone’s fault. For the most part the financial crisis was not the result of individual wickedness or folly. It is not a story of pantomime villains and village idiots. Instead the crisis reflected a failure of the entire system of financial sector governance.
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