This isn't going to be long as I don't really have a very large understanding of business and economics.
I spent most of today reading (I have been working, but watching a TV doesn't require a brain cell... it does but it steals them from me rather than make me use them) a new web comic. I came across two comics which to me seem to sum up what went wrong a little better than, "those fat cats at the top taking too many risks". First I do think that I am right in saying that all the fat cats did was let their sub-ordinates do the risk taking for them. So this cartoon is probably a more accurate description of what went wrong.
Next the bonus culture. In this one, the character seems to show the real response of bankers to the emergency bail out funds.
As I said I don't know much, but if you have people who made bad investments on a faulty idea, what happened in the past will surely happen again. I doubt they would really have believed that the first failiure was actually their fault, and so learn from their lesson.
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Actually the bonus' thing is far more complicated, or simple depending on where you sit politically. The guys that are getting really large ones take them as a percentage (usually about 1-5%) of the profit they make for the bank. The reason they get £1 million pounds is that they make the bank £100 million...that seems reasonable to me, considering that companies like PC World will take a 30-40% profit when they make a computer, 1-5% seems incredibly fair.
As for the risk thing, you know that the reason banks took dangerous risks was because they knew they would be bailed out by a socialist state, because of the reaction to Northern Rock. Taking the comic book example, it would be like the parents giving the kids the money they lost on comic books back out of sympathy - of course they aren't going to learn what is acceptable risk and what isn't!
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