Top bankers fight back in bonus row
TOP executives?at the world’s biggest banks teamed up to defend bonuses yesterday, in the first clear sign of an industry fightback against threats from policymakers to curb banker pay.
Top bankers from Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank said bonuses did not cause the financial crisis, as they concluded a two-day summit in Germany.
And they said that curbing the pay packages they can offer to attract talent would be damaging and a distraction from more important issues.
Vice chairman at Swiss banking powerhouse Credit Suisse, Urs Rohner, told the Banks in Transition conference: “Bonus payments alone have not caused the financial crisis.”
Deutsche Bank chief executive Josef Ackermann said banks could not let star performers slip through their fingers.
“The war for talent is in full swing,” he said. He accused politicians of focusing too much on bonuses rather than more important issues. Ackermann said there was no clear link or pattern between a good or bad bank based on the size of bonuses they awarded.
Morgan Stanley co-president Walid Chammah said the bank was “against absolute caps on compensation levels”, as have been proposed by several policymakers including French and German finance ministers.
But Stephen Green, chairman of UK giant HSBC, admitted “wrong targets were set for incentives… without regard for sustainability”.
Green said the lesson from Lehman’s demise was instead that corporate structures need to be simpler so regulators can understand better which parts they need to monitor.