If you want to work somewhere where the pot is equally distributed and the love is shared about liberally, banking is not the place to be. Today’s big report on banking pay by the think-tank New Financial contains the following chart illustrating just how skewed are banking bonuses towards code staff (defined as key risk takers, important managers etc.) as opposed to the average banker on the street.
At Deutsche Bank’s corporate and investment bank, for example, 4% of the staff receive 50% of the bonus pool. This sounds pretty Piketty-esque until you look at the extremes of inequality over at HSBC, where a mere 0.1% of the people are getting 11% of the bonus pool. Cue outrage over the inequity at Britain’s biggest bank – except the numbers aren’t entirely meaningful because most of HSBC’s 203,000 employees don’t work in the markets business and wouldn’t be eligible for bonuses anyway… Nor are Europe’s banks the only ones to skew their compensation distribution: at Goldman Sachs, 20% of the bonus pool is reportedly distributed to the firm’s 400 partners.
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