Allister Heath en City A.M. explica por qué los bonus de los banqueros no son el problema y los incentivos largo-placistas no son (no han sido) la panacea para la City:
It is true and deplorable that some bankers were incentivised according to excessively short-term targets. This must change. But tens of thousands of employees at Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, RBS and HBOS owned stakes in their firms and had reinvested their bonuses. This was especially true of many of the top decision-makers. Bear Sterns and Lehman had been diligent in promoting employee share ownership – around 30 per cent of the total equity in each case – in a bid to encourage long-termism. It wasn’t a great success. (...)
All of this shows that the bankers in question destroyed their banks because they made errors and faulty judgments on a colossal scale (for which they deserved to be wiped out) – not because they were deliberately betting the bank in a bid to make a quick buck. They were mistaken, not evil or deliberately reckless.
Entonces, ¿dónde reside el problema?
The main drivers were the ridiculously low interest rate policy pursued for years by a Fed obsessed with preventing all recessions; the crippling East-West imbalances in savings and investment flows (about which the Bank of England has a good paper out today); global rules which promoted low capital reserves for banks, with many loopholes; and a giant intellectual error which thought that bubbles were impossible, that house prices would never fall and that statistical models had allowed bankers and regulators to control risk completely.
