Greed Is Back

The Telegraph has a poll and several stories on the City bonuses this year.

The New City operates on a vastly increased scale. London has     become the world's financial capital, overtaking New York as     the destination of choice for international investors. Long-term     structural shifts and US regulation have coincided with a rampaging     bull market to catapult London into the sweet spot of globalisation:     more cosmopolitan than ever before, more competitive and     meritocratic, and yet somehow even more mysterious to the rest of     the country.

Oooh, the horrors, the iniquities, of people making pots of cash. The thing is, those bonsues are profit shares. Isn't this what we want the owners of capital to do? Share the profits with the workforce that makes them? It's also a pretty predictable result of financial globalisation, as above. Those few hundred thousand people are skimming the profits off supplying financial services to a significant fraction of the world: it's not being made of of our 60 million wallets, rather a significant fraction of the world's 6 billion wallets.