RAPID RESPONSES
Skin in the game
Naturally any reference to stripping is bound to have a distracting effect, but readers seem to have missed the point of Jamie Whyte’s comparison in his column [Strippers can show us bankers’ just rewards, last Wednesday].
On Friday Tim Shoebridge complained that strippers are not sufficiently focused on the long-term profits of their workplace. That may be true, but is Tim seriously suggesting that our current model has done a better job of that?
Ultimately, it is the responsibility of owners, shareholders or – in the case of banks – clients to protect their assets’ long-term interests.
Whyte offered an alternative method by which individual bankers’ contribution to profits could be more fairly measured. One which forces them to have some “skin in the game” should things go wrong – incidentally, the way it already works for prop traders, as I once was.
Dominic Graham De Montrose
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Cheque, please
I read with great interest in Friday’s Davos Diary that the Japanese Prime Minister was spotted “serving the wine himself in an intimate dinner at the Hotel Elli”. Since the Prime Minister’s commitments kept him in Tokyo, I am sure he would be surprised – and eager to know to whom he was serving the wine. Sadly, even Japanese technology has not advanced to offer teleportation.
Hiroshi Suzuki,
Embassy of Japan