http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... government

The politicians are either craven or thinking about their own future so it's hardly a surprise the bankers are carrying on regardless.

What's new. The law is ill-conceived and has predictably perverse consequences. In this case it will force up banks wage bills to the same extent that it reduces their bonus payouts, meaning it is harder to claw back overpaid bonuses or to reduce costs during the next downturn.

What this guy wants is total pay caps for people he doesn't like. But he didn't have the authority to write such a law, so he cobbled together a pisspoor proxy that is easily evaded, and now he's being a whiny bitch about it.

You can't bitch about it when you made the law with massive loopholes.

and quite frankly (IMHO) the law should not be there

If as a salesman I have a contract that says I will be paid 10% comission on sales then irrecpective of if I work for a Bank selling financial products or a tarmac company selling tarmac I should be paid my bonus. The politicians should not interfear.

They probably could try and tax the hell out of it though.

They're not salesmen, the government already interferes in the contract between you and your employer in a multitude of ways, and I suspect you haven't got the capability to cause massive damage to the entire economy if you get out of hand.

The structure of the bonus culture in our financial institutions was one of the identified causes of the trouble in the late noughties which has brought misery to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. This is an attempt to prevent a recurrence of that behaviour and therefore the massive negative consequences it eventually brings. The only people saying otherwise are people with a vested interest in that culture continuing/coming back. There are already a vast swathe of legislation, both national international, which define how our financial institutions do, or at least should, operate. I've yet to hear a valid argument as to what's so special or disastrous about this one.

Yes but commission is different from a bonus which is there to keep you from moving to a competitor. They could pay a higher commission or higher basic. Loads of wages are tweaked because of tax rates or how certain benefits are treated.

Excellent news. The same rule shows that cutting bonuses but raising wages isn't cheating. Controversy over, it turns out that different types of pay are not all... pay.

It doesn't address the behaviour. It is a cack-handed attempt to remove the motivation, but easily evaded. They could have stipulated that bonuses over X% of wages should be paid in bonds (the ones that get the bigger haircuts), and then allowed the bonds to be sold off immediately. That would give an early warning of the employees, and the secondary markets, level of faith in the business. One which is far less susceptible to manipulation than Libor - albeit surely less liquid.

This would still have some of the negative implications of the current plan, but would at least have the value of enabling the market to provide useful information, while limiting the need for banks to convert half their wage bill into the sort of payments that are hard to claw back.

I have, if anything, a vested interest in the banks losing out to hedge funds and private equity outfits, these being the majority of my employers. More money would ultimately go into my pocket if it were possible to make it stick. But I object in principle to doing things that are counter productive and ill conceived.