Bonuses

Even the BBC is reported to be talking about having a cut price CEO when it replaces its present one. If implemented this sounds like a good idea which could help bring a touch of salary and bonus modesty to those companies where the senior executives have paid themselves huge rewards at the expense of their owners. The main culprits are the banks of course and the amounts paid to their CEO certainly stink. The CEOs of the two banks saved by the taxpayer should not be paid bonuses, although they will be with the government hiding behind the entity they set up to hold the taxpayers' shareholding. Will though UK executives get to spend their ill gotten gains or will the financial tsunami coming our way wipe them out along with the rest of us? Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has a chilling article in the Telegraph to day here that makes for frightening reading and makes one wonder how those responsible for bringing this country to its knees should be made accountable for their grievous failures and what we should do to prevent the same thing happening again. No matter what is said about increasing transparency there are too many layers of government which lead to greater opaqueness and thus make it impossible to tell what is really going on and who to praise when things go right and who to blame when things go wrong. One layer of government holding us back, costing us a bomb, opaque in the extreme and unbelievably undemocratic is the EU. We don't need it and we'd be better off out. John Redwood has a good blog on this here.