T N Ninan: Put up those walls

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

In a week when yet more banks have reported yet more trouble, and when many more billions have disappeared from their books, the debate about obscene salaries and bonuses for the people who create such carnage has acquired a sharper edge. Even when a financial firm is in desperate straits, it announces huge year-end bonuses because the people in some divisions have done well and should not be penalised because those in another division bungled (as though the shareholder whose money they are playing with can be similarly compartmentalised). Or, the bonus is justified because talent must not walk off to the next firm. And yet, the extreme unfairness of such cosseted denizens being able to place the burden of mismanagement on the taxpayer (as with Northern Rock, in Britain) or to blame it on the monetary authority (as many do in the US, with Alan Greenspan standing accused of having created the asset bubble) strikes everyone other than perhaps those who live and work in this lucrative bubble.

Different takes by different writers have figured on this page in recent days, as the debate has grown. Lucy Kellaway has written, with her unerring accuracy, about how even the bankers who get multi-million-dollar bonuses are miserable because they think someone else has got more (she thinks they need love instead). Martin Wolf suggests that bankers should be given only longer-term rewards, so that they cannot walk off with fat bonuses before the long-term consequences of their actions become evident. Others have called for more shareholder activism, and those inclined to expropriating barely-earned income would suggest higher taxes when incomes reach the stratosphere.

The problem with all or most of these solutions is that they will not change the reality, which is that investment banks, hedge funds et al run on the basis of the star system. The difference between hiring the best merchant banker and someone two notches lower could mean the difference between managing a billion-dollar issue and losing the contract, just as a movie star can bring (or fail to bring) audiences to a theatre and a star cricket batsman makes the difference between victory and defeat. So, as in all winner-take-all activities, the stars in investment banking command stratospheric reward packages. And since you are dealing with large teams that count among them many stars, the whole system gets oriented towards star-style payments.

This is unexceptionable "" sport lovers and move-goers are not complaining about their money going to the people they worship, any more than those who put their money in a hedge fund complain about fees and other pre-emptions when they pocket fat returns on their investment. But it is only in banking that the sins of the stars get visited on the rest of the paying public, in one form or another. The question, therefore, is to how to provide some insulation. And it is Deepak Lal, another of our our esteemed columnists, who got the point earlier this week when he argued that we need to go back to the banking walls set up in the wake of an earlier period of financial excesses, which resulted in the Great Depression: Separate the banks that take deposits from the public, from the sexier (and riskier) investment banking and hedge fund operations that are then obliged to play with only shareholders' money. That way, the price of failure or worse is paid by the people who chose to bet on the game, not your unsuspecting man in the street. It is an argument against the idea of "universal banking" which has gained currency in recent years, but it is an idea whose time may have come.