According to a research note from UBS published this week: "The 231 core staff who run Barclaysreceived remuneration of £554 million in 2010, whereas shareholders who provide £51 billion of equity capital received a dividend of £653 million."
The board, which is supposed to run the business in the interests of the owners, should hang its head in shame at that division of rewards. Those 231 employees could not operate without the shareholders' £51 billion, whereas the shareholders could most certainly find 231 others to run the bank, and for a lot less than the average £2 million-plus this lot were paid, given that, to borrow Warren Buffett's observation, they are probably making the mistake of confusing their value with the value of the seats in which they sit.
Profits might even be higher. The authorities today have created monetary conditions where banks can make easy profits to rebuild their balance sheets. The central banks adopted a similar policy after the banking crisis of 1982 and it worked then, though in those days bankers did not think government-guaranteed profits entitled them to bonuses.
This time we could be stirring up trouble for ourselves by allowing such inequality of income to re-emerge. Robert Wade, a professor at the London School of Economics, has noted how the polarisation of US society as reflected in its politics has gone from a high point in the Twenties to a low between 1950 and 1980 and back up to a high now.
His concern is this extremism in politics correlates very closely with extremes of income. By illustration, the share of the top 1% of households in US national income peaked at 22% in 1929, then fell progressively to a low of only 8% in the Seventies. It then took off in the Reagan years to hit 22% again in 2006.
It is hard to believe that the pattern in this country would be very different and it seems undeniable that polarisation in incomes leads to polarisation in society, that the gulf in incomes becomes a gulf in values.
There will, of course, always be anarchists looking for an excuse to kick in a window, but much more threatening for the Government and damaging for the country is the seething resentment of all the others in society who would never dream of such a thing
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