Five Reasons Why Bankers Should Get Whopping Bonuses

Zoe Lyons, star of McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow and Mock The Week insists we should all give in to bankers’ demands for monstrous bonuses 

It is a commonly held belief that you need money to make money, and nobody makes money quite like investment bankers. Equally, we have all found (to our own cost) that nothing can lose money quite like a banking crisis. Yet barely two years after the financial crash, with many people’s lives still smouldering in the wreckage of their repossessed homes and lost businesses, bankers are once again banging on about how much they deserve their behemoth-sized bonuses. 

 Shouldn’t they be made to suffer a little like the rest of us? Apparently not. Rather it appears that these Wonga wizards are delicate creatures that require massive incentives to keep them focused on the task in hand of cleaning up the mess of their own making. 

How can bankers demanding bonuses possibly be right? I find it very difficult to get my head around this. So I have wracked my brains in order to come up with some good reasons as to why bankers must get their peachy perks. 

1.) The Credit Crash is, like, So Yesterday’s News 
Firstly, if we don’t give bankers their bonuses, we are being defeatist. As the head of Barclays Investment, Bob The Gezzer Diamond recently pointed out the time for remorse and apology from the banks is now officially over, so basically get over it and stop whinging like girls in cheap blouses. 

It is dull to dwell on past failures, to concentrate on the thousands of jobs lost because small businesses failed when they couldn’t get the loans from the banks to keep them afloat, oh yawny yawn it’s so 2010, move on. 

2.) Bankers Make More Money Than Kendal Mint Cake 
Secondly, the City of London argues that it brings in billions of pounds in revenue every year and it is pretty much the only thing that still does in this country. We manufacture less and less - that is a fact. If Kendal mint cake brought in this much dough, we wouldn’t have this problem, but it doesn’t.
But thankfully we do have loads of floppy haired tits in bespoke suits who have the balls to risk money (that isn’t even theirs) in scary unethical investments to plough money back into our economy for the good of all of us. Phew! 

3.) Upsetting Bankers Is Bad For The Environment 
Thirdly, there could be environmental implications to withholding bonuses. 

We have to pay these posh tits loads of money, otherwise they will get into massive Elton John size hissy fits and take their ‘skills’ elsewhere like the Cayman Islands and that is bad, because the Cayman islands are small and the arrival of so many cigar smoking bullshit-spouting idiots on a tropical island will upset the flora and fauna could be a disaster for its eco system and cause untold environmental damage. 

Therefore if you are against banker’s bonuses in this country you are basically for the killing of turtles in the Caribbean and using their shells as salad bowls and their offspring for ashtrays. 

4.) Bankers Are Actually Incredibly Generous 
Fourthly, let us not forget that when they are not saving up for their incredibly comfortable retirements at the age of 40, these bankers are also spending and keeping many small specialised industries afloat. 

The likes of Hermes, Ferrari, Rolex, sparklers from Tiffany’s and untold numbers of family-run chalets in the millionaire jet set ski resorts of Cloisters and Aspen are heavily dependent on money-splashing bankers. 

They are giving back people, oh yes, they are giving back. 

5.) Whinging About The Recession Is Boring 
And finally it’s not like bankers haven’t tightened their belts at all. They have reduced their bonus pool so it is not like they are having a complete laugh at our expense. No sir, they have cut the bonus pool by £0.3 billion so shush your whinging. 

Barclays, for example, is only dolling out £5-6 billion in hand-outs this year, and that has to be split between 25,000 investment staff. Which works out at a miserly average of just £200,000 each and when you think about it, that really isn’t a lot of money these days. I mean what can you get for two hundred grand these days? Perhaps a one bedroom flat in Archway? What banker wants one of those? 

There, I have tried my best. In my attempt to make sense of it all I can only conclude that bonuses must be essential otherwise we will have financial workers who feel undervalued having to flog mint cake and diamonds out of the casings of dead turtles from a dingy flat in North London just to make ends meet. 

Convinced? No me neither. 

Zoe Lyons is currently on her Clown Busting Tour. To find out dates go to www.zoelyons.co.uk. 

Content produced by Sabotage Times.

Thursday, 17th February 2011

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