Davos Newbies

A reporter from the Financial Times looks into why no one is admitting they flew corporate jets to get to Davos (except for JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon), yet the numbers of private jet landings is at a record high. A+ for enterprising reporting. But a F for gullibility. Here’s a paragraph offered without qualification:

There are many arguments for executives using corporate jets. They are beneficial for security reasons, they allow executives to work together in the air and can be cost-efficient compared with the price of first-class tickets.

The outrage against outsized bonuses in finance is understandably growing. Here’s Obama today:

One point I want to make is that all of us are going to have responsibilities to get this economy moving again.  And when I saw an article today indicating that Wall Street bankers had given themselves $20 billion worth of bonuses — the same amount of bonuses as they gave themselves in 2004 — at a time when most of these institutions were teetering on collapse and they are asking for taxpayers to help sustain them, and when taxpayers find themselves in the difficult position that if they don’t provide help that the entire system could come down on top of our heads — that is the height of irresponsibility.  It is shameful.

The only mystery to me is why has it taken so long?

I’ve never had a problem with entrepreneurs getting staggering rewards. The Google guys deserve their billions, as does Bill Gates, who is providing perhaps the best demonstration ever of how to spend your money once you have it. But why on earth did m&a rainmakers and whizzes on trading desks ever rate multi-million dollar bonuses? I think the only answer is the bonuses soared upward because they could. Banks made outsized profits and paid the bulk of them to their employees (or, at least, a subset of employees) rather than to shareholders.

The phenomenon led to terrible distortions in the market for talent. I may have missed something but when I graduated from my elite university in 1978, no one talked about investment banking. When I returned for my 25th reunion in 2003, the faculty members still around from my day told me that a healthy proportion of students wanted to become “i-bankers”. Given how these Ivy Leaguers screwed things up (as did the more rough-and-tumble crowd that was recruited by places like Bear Stearns), maybe it’s a good thing that this part of the purported intelligentsia didn’t go into neurosurgery or structural engineering.

A few years after I left the World Economic Forum, but at a point when some people there still occasionally sought my advice, I suggested a session on “What’s too much?” I was thinking of the great wealth CEOs were accumulating, rather than Goldman Sachs bankers. But the question applies even more forcibly today.

I have a private theory that both corporations and banks could probably invert their pay and reward scales. At some point, perhaps near the boardroom, rewards would decrease rather than increase. Companies would save money, and the leadership would be drawn from those who really want the responsibility — and, above all, the power — rather than those just in search of lucre.