Unless you are a Royal Bank of Scotland shareholder, you probably missed the great white apology for the financial crisis. On his last day in the job — after repeatedly refusing to apologize for having to be bailed out with £20 billion of public money, and only when he was prompted by a shareholder — Sir Fred Goodwin, the RBS chief executive, this week said he was “sorry.”
Was that supposed to be the catharsis? I didn’t order the full Oresteia, but I’d have preferred to see Fred — and any other top bankers thinking of deigning to address their staggering incompetence — adopt the weaselly styling: “I apologize if anyone was offended.” It would be marginally less pathetic.
Those of us less willing to trust bankers than we were a year ago — i.e. all earthlings — might be cynical and say that RBS’ glorified “soz!” was little more than a pre-emptive strike, what with bonus season being almost upon us. You know bonus season — that time of year when financial folk remind you that whereas normal people are motivated by their salary and what we might summarize as “not losing their jobs”, bankers decline even to set the world’s money on fire without being paid an extra wedge for their trouble.
Obviously, RBS have said they’ll be paying bonuses, as will the rest of the nationalized banks. And obviously, caring about the economic crisis is starting to feel like a guilty pleasure, what with all the important Strictly Come Dancing news. But it seems as good a time as any to ask whether you feel you’ve had your pound of contrition off the masters of the universe? I can’t say I’ve had my eight-thousandth of an ounce yet. The ratio of stories about bankers “suffering” to stories about bankers saying sorry is currently about 837:1.
Back in September, New York magazine ran a great piece in which an anonymous Lehman Brothers trader gave his account of the days following the bank’s collapse. There was a lot of talk of “sudden onset poverty” — I think he was going to have to let the ski chalet go — but the most confounding vignette concerned the trader taking his eight-year-old son to his first baseball game. Anyway, the kid tries and fails to get the attention of Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ star shortstop, who’s jogging out to the field. “Daddy, why doesn’t he answer?” he asks. “And suddenly, the trader boiled with anger,” we learned. “He had done his part, put in the 16-hour days to buy his kid the best seats in the stadium. Lehman and the career he signed up for were disappearing in front of his eyes. Yet the Yankees were losing, and Derek Jeter was still going to take home his $21 million, and he couldn’t even bother to show some gratitude. It was a fantasy world, out of touch.” Yes. Ring any bells? “’Those guys have the easiest job,’ the trader thought, ‘when it’s clear they don’t care. In my next life I want to be a baseball player.’”
Bankers are traditionally supposed to be throwing themselves out of the windows by now, and even though any fall would be broken by the vast cushion of public money we laid out for them, I guess we still need to ask: How are they coping? Well, as I sat in a Kensington pub the other night (this is a proper field report, from the heart of the story), unable to hear my companion for the chap shouting about being “locked on” for his bonus — which seemed to be counted in a multiple to which he referred to as “mil” — I hazarded they were pretty much scraping by.
Yet, in the manner of those male columnists who fret about having walked past a hoodie stealing something and having done nothing, I find myself wondering in print: Should I have intervened with Mr. Locked-on? After all, I regard myself as having in effect paid for his pint. At the very least I should have asked him if he wanted crisps and a foot rub with it.
Either way it is clear that neither he nor any of these stubbornly tight-lipped banking chiefs have any idea how to disport themselves in the new climate they themselves created. Much as the police or BBC staff are occasionally forced to go on refresher courses, surely the upper echelons of financial services should be sent on training days to teach them how to behave in public now they’ve cocked everyone’s world up.
No one’s saying people should have the right to know if a senior banker lives in their community. (Although if any legislators fancy the idea, can I make a case for it being called Marina’s Law?) But plenty of US judges sentence the most forlorn souls to stand outside Wal-Mart wearing a sandwich board reading “I stole from Wal-Mart”. Perhaps senior bankers could be required to wander up and down high streets wearing boards reading something on the lines of: “My industry isn’t very good at its job and now you might lose your house. I am sorry.”
