It’s not strange that bankers have so much more money than anybody else. It’s like the way that women who work in sweet shops are always fat. Not a profound point, I’ll grant you, but it’s striking how rarely you see it made. In other industries, this sort of thing is pretty much a given. If you went around to Christian Louboutin’s house, you wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs Louboutin had an unusually vast number of shoes, would you?
Sure, there might not be a Mrs Louboutin; not a punt I’d like to make with a French shoe designer, but you get the point. People who work in theatre get a lot of theatre tickets, and people who work in banks get a lot of cash. They’re swimming in the stuff. It all goes through them.
As to whether it’s fair, well, that’s a different issue. And a simple one, too, because it glaringly isn’t fair at all. But ‘fairness’ — although politicians all drone on about in their own special way (Miliband as a whine, Clegg as a plea, Cameron as though it’s something he’s just found on his shoe) — isn’t really why politicians are so keen to have a crack at bankers. Because it’s not about fairness. It’s about power.
This isn’t profound either, but hell, that’s not what I’m for. You know that bit in Bonfire Of The Vanities, when you first realise that Sherman McCoy considers himself to be one of the Masters Of The Universe? That annoyed you, right? No? Well, you probably work in banking, then. It annoyed everybody else. It certainly annoyed politicians. They can stand being paid less than bankers, but they can’t stand being less important than them.
I get where they are coming from.
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