Banking giant JP Morgan announced £16billion in pay and perks for staff yesterday, signalling the start of a bumper New Year for bankers.
The huge figure flies in the face of international efforts to curb excessive payments to financial staff, characterised by Chancellor Alistair Darling's recently unveiled supertax on bonuses.
The U.S. company said the amount was 18 per cent higher than a year ago, even though overall staff numbers have fallen slightly.
On average its 25,000 investment bankers around the world will pocket a pay package worth £232,194 each - but the big dealmakers would have earned several million.
Profits: Pedestrians walk past the JP Morgan Chase headquarters in New York as the company reported a big jump in net profit in the fourth quarter
Financial experts believe it is the first in a succession of handouts that will see more than £40billion paid out in the next fortnight.
Wall Street titans Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch are all due to reveal their profits and payouts next week.
It came as Barack Obama piled pressure on Mr Darling and Gordon Brown to come up with new ways of clawing back taxpayers' cash used to bail out the financial sector.
The U.S. president has announced plans for a levy to make American banks repay £55billion over the next ten years.
He denounced the 'obscene' level of bonuses and called for 'policymakers in other important financial centres to do something similar'.
The levy is expected to cost British banks operating there up to £ 10billion.
Tough stance: President Obama described bank bonuses, handed out by executives such as JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, as 'obscene'
Yesterday TUC general secretary Brendan Barber called for a tax on bank transactions to force financial institutions in this country to make 'a proper contribution'.
He said: 'These obscene bonuses paid so soon after the world's taxpayers had to rescue the banking system show that there is something fundamentally wrong in the relationship between banking and the rest of the economy.
'Banks are meant to support society, but instead taxpayers' support guarantees that whatever happens to the economy banks will continue to pay gigantic bonuses.'
It is estimated that the taxpayer-funded bailout of financial institutions in Britain cost £850billion.
Mr Darling's 50 per cent windfall tax on bonuses over £25,000 was announced with great fanfare in last month's Pre-Budget Report as a way of 'changing behaviour' in the City. The Chancellor said it would raise a relatively modest £550million.
But Downing Street yesterday stressed that it was instead a major revenue raising measure.
Mr Brown's spokesman repeatedly refused to condemn the JP Morgan payout, referring only to 'behaviour we saw in previous years' that 'was unacceptable'.
He added: 'It's for individual banks to make their decisions about how they wish to respond.'
Treasury officials are considering forcing the banks to pay £50billion into a crisis fund which would be used to stabilise the financial system if it got into trouble again.
The measure has already received cautious approval from Shadow Chancellor George Osborne.
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