Hugo Dixon

Shortly after last year’s bonus round I was having lunch with the boss of an investment firm. He told me how he heard a handful of staff had been grumbling about what, by most people’s standards, were still extraordinary pay packages. He called them into his office and told them that, since they were unhappy, they should “Just Go”.

Most of them packed their things and left the firm. But the next day one came back and said he had been misunderstood. My interlocutor said he hadn’t misunderstood him at all. The employee clearly felt he was worth more than he was paid. He should take his luck and go elsewhere as he clearly didn’t have his heart in his current job. He should “Just Go”. And he duly did.

These words “Just Go” stuck in my mind because financial services bosses use them far too rarely. My lunch companion was perhaps an exception because his family is a big shareholder in his firm. Most other bosses are stewards for shareholders – and normally not terribly good stewards at that.

Of course, banking and investment bosses do have some equity in their firms but typically they don’t act like owners. They want to get paid a huge amount themselves. They also want to be surrounded by a phalanx of fawning minions who tell them they are masters of the universe. That boosts their egos. The best way of achieving that is to pay their minions millions, even if it costs the shareholders.

During the bubble years, pay in the financial services industry went through the roof. It wasn’t just for the stars either. Fairly ordinary middle-ranking bankers raked it in. Even after the bubble burst, pay has taken a long time to come down. The 2007 bonus round was a record. Although pay was reined in after Lehman Brothers went bust in 2008, it rebounded the following year.

More recently, especially in Europe, bankers have hit relatively hard times. Compensation is being cut and banks such as Deutsche Bank have said they will do more. But returns to shareholders are still miserable. What’s more, as the economic situation in much of the world remains challenging, the general public is resentful towards an industry that played a role in creating the current mess and which has had to be bailed out repeatedly with public funds.

Quite apart from infusions of capital into specific institutions, the whole market has been buoyed by massive injections of cheap money by central banks across the world – whether it is round after round of quantitative easing in America, Japan and the UK or the European Central Bank’s ingenious support operations.

The endless stream of scandals – money laundering, mis-selling of financial services, rogue trading and attempted manipulation of interests rates – has further sullied an industry comprising institutions such as Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan, RBS and UBS.

On a more technical note, high pay reduces the earnings that banks can squirrel away to build up their capital buffers as a protection against future crises. Although regulators are pushing for higher capital ratios, this can be achieved either by increasing the amount of equity in a bank or by cutting its lending. If banks put too much emphasis on the latter route, the economy will be put under further pressure.

The coming bonus round represents a golden opportunity to reset compensation to a much lower new base. What is needed is not merely to cut pay in line with reduced revenue, but something more radical – a significant drop in the proportion of the revenue pot devoted to staff. Although the final figures won’t be set for several months, now is the time to start planning.

What’s more, this is not something that should be left entirely to managers. Given that there is an intense shareholder and public interest in curbing pay in financial services, investors and regulators should get involved. They should call in bank chairmen and tell them they expect them to take advantage of the current, uniquely favourable, climate.

Managers will undoubtedly say that they are already cracking down on compensation and that it is best not to move too rapidly otherwise key staff will jump ship. But if shareholders and regulators give the same broad message to all banks – even if it is not their role to give specific instructions – there will be less risk of such poaching. With pretty much the whole industry downsizing in response to weak market conditions, there isn’t going to be that much appetite among rivals to hire.

It is perhaps too much to hope bank bosses to think about the public interest. But they are mostly smart individuals who can see how the winds of change are blowing. They understand that it could be in their personal interest to get ahead of the curve. Some of those who didn’t seem able to adapt to the new Zeitgeist – such as former Barclays boss Bob Diamond – have been defenestrated.

Bankers will always be tempted to play their own version of the game of Monopoly one more time and see if they can pass Go and collect another $200 (add several noughts). And, even in the current climate, there will be many who complain if their pay is cut. But the message to them should be the same as that given by my lunch companion: “Just Go!”

European integration tends to advance first with squabbling then with fudge. Every country has its national interest to defend. Some politicians appreciate the need to create a strong bloc that can compete effectively with the United States, China and other powers. But that imperative typically plays second fiddle to more parochial concerns with the result that time is lost and suboptimal solutions are chosen.

Amidst the europhoria unleashed by the European Central Bank’s bond-buying plan, it is easy to miss the immense challenges posed by two complex dossiers that have just landed on leaders’ desks: the proposed EADS/BAE merger; and a planned single banking supervisor.

Look first at the plan to create a defence and aerospace giant to rival America’s Boeing. This has been under discussion since at least 1997 when the UK’s Tony Blair, France’s Jacques Chirac and Germany’s Helmut Kohl called on the industry to unify in the face of U.S. competition. London, Paris and Berlin are the key players in this game because they have the major assets.

Since 1997, progress has been patchy. Airbus, previously an awkward Franco-German-British consortium, was gradually turned into a proper company wholly owned by EADS – and EADS itself was created by the merger of France’s Aerospatiale and Germany’s Dasa. But Paris and Berlin insisted on a dysfunctional governance structure designed to balance their respective power rather than promote an effective organisation and EADS’ early years were bedevilled by scandal. What’s more, BAE opted to stay out of European integration, instead merging with Britain’s Marconi and going on a U.S. acquisition spree.

The cost of developing new products, such as fighter aeroplanes, is huge: Europe’s last major initiative in this area, the Eurofighter, was developed through another suboptimal consortium. If Europe can’t get its act together, BAE may eventually find itself swept into the arms of a large U.S. group and governments may ultimately be forced to buy American. Being dependent on even such a close ally should not be their first choice. So there is a strategic benefit in creating a streamlined European defence and aerospace group.

The best solution would be to merge EADS and BAE, and run the new group on commercial lines. The politicians would abandon their right to decide who would manage it or where its factories and research centres would be located. The most important interests of France, Germany and Britain could be protected by ring-fencing their secrets and giving each government a veto over any takeover of the group.

To be fair, the planned merger – which leaked last week – takes a big step in this direction. A complex shareholder pact, which balances French and German interests in EADS, would be scrapped. The private shareholders involved in that pact – France’s Lagardere and Germany’s Daimler – are also expected to sell out eventually.

The snag is that Paris would keep a stake of around 9 percent, potentially letting it pull the strings from behind the scenes. Both London and Berlin seem worried about that. Germany may also be queasy about a plan, so far unannounced, to locate the merged company’s defence HQ in the UK and its civilian aerospace HQ in France.

Even if these circles can be squared, Washington may cause trouble. BAE has been able to acquire a substantial U.S. defence business because of the special military relationship between London and Washington. If the U.S. administration concludes that the new group is effectively controlled by Paris, with which relations are cooler, it may put so many controls on its U.S. business that it becomes commercially unattractive.

It would be better if France sold out of the combined group and depoliticised it entirely. But that doesn’t seem on the cards.

Now look at the euro zone’s plans for a banking supervisor, for which the European Commission unveiled a blueprint last week. Again, the idea is sensible, albeit not a silver bullet. A centralised supervisor based on the ECB might be able to clean up the banking cesspit in places like Greece, Spain and Ireland. This could pave the way for struggling lenders to be recapitalised with euro zone money rather than national money. And that, in turn, could play a role in diminishing the euro crisis.

There are, though, at least two major problems. First, Berlin doesn’t want its local savings banks supervised by the ECB. This is largely a matter of protecting vested interests, as the Sparkassen are closely linked to local politicians. But it is precisely such incestuous relationships that caused mayhem with Spain’s savings banks, the cajas. It would set a bad precedent if Germany could cut a special deal for itself merely because it is the biggest boy in the euro class.

Second, how will the interests of the 10 countries that are part of the European Union but don’t use the single currency be protected as the euro zone moves ahead with banking integration? This is of particular concern for the UK, Europe’s financial capital. Under the European Commission’s plans, the 17 members of the euro would caucus together to decide on matters like technical rules for banking which cover the entire EU. London could therefore find itself perpetually outvoted.

There may be ways of squaring these circles. But, as with defence integration, politicians will need to keep their eye on the big picture even as they defend their legitimate national interests. That hasn’t always been their forte.

Five years after the credit crunch erupted in August 2007, banking still looks like an industry running amok. Scandals keep tumbling out of the closet: an alleged ring of banks including Barclays that attempted to rig interest rates; money laundering by HSBC; insider tips passed by Nomura to its clients; and terrible risk management by JPMorgan, where traders have so far lost $5.8 billion.

True, some of these scandals date from the rip-roaring days of the bubble. And the industry is now being reformed. But the public is growing impatient with the slow pace of change, especially as recession bites in large parts of the industrialised world. Some observers therefore want to clear out the entire old guard. The idea is that only new teams can clean the cesspit. There are also increasing calls to break up banks into supposedly low-risk retail banks and casino-style investment banks. Even Sandy Weill, the man who created Citigroup, now advocates splitting up financial conglomerates.

Something must be done. The financial industry has made a mockery of capitalism. Despite endless bailouts, bankers are still paid far too much. Profits are privatised, while losses get socialised.

The regulatory noose around the industry is tightening. After the credit crunch, there was a global push to jack up capital and liquidity buffers, while reining in risk-taking. If lenders get into trouble in future, the idea is that they will be wound down safely rather than bailed out. Bankers’ compensation is also being modified – for example, allowing pay to be clawed back in future years if there are losses.

This battery of new regulations is putting pressure on the industry’s profitability – and its pay. Banks are reviewing their business models. They are cutting back on proprietary risk-taking, slashing jobs, and even pulling out of some business lines.

The snag is that it will take until the end of the decade for all these changes to be implemented. That’s partly because the technicalities are complex; and partly because policymakers fear that, if they come down too hard on such a crucial industry, their economies will be driven even deeper into recession.

In the circumstances, proposals for wholesale management change and breakups have strong popular appeal. But they are not the best options.

Last month, both Bob Diamond, Barclays’ chief executive, and Kenichi Watanabe, Nomura’s chief executive, rightly fell on their swords. But if everybody with a senior position in a troubled firm departed, novices would be in charge. That’s just too dangerous.

If managers are tainted by scandal, however remotely, they clearly need to go. They must also quit if they are unable to shift their mindset from the money-grabbing culture of the past to the more service-orientated culture of the future or can’t apologise sincerely for the excesses of the past.

These yardsticks should be used to determine whether the managers currently in the firing line – such as JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Deutsche Bank’s co-chief executive Anshu Jain, whose chairman has just cleared him of involvement in the Libor scandal – should walk the plank.

Meanwhile, it is naive to think that breaking up banks would be a quick fix to the sector’s problems. It’s just not true that a combination of investment and retail banking caused the crisis. Plenty of retail-only banks – the UK’s Northern Rock and America’s Washington Mutual, not to mention Spain’s savings banks – got into trouble. And remember: the biggest failure of all was a pure investment bank, Lehman Brothers.

What’s more, breakups can’t happen fast. Given the continued euro crisis, a standalone investment bank such as Barclays Capital would struggle to finance itself in the market. The only way it could survive would be through liquidity injections from the public sector. It might even need to be nationalised. Once these investment banks are shrunk, de-risked and recapitalised, breakups may be possible. But that’s at least a five-year job.

So what should be done in the meantime? Further action is possible on at least three fronts.

First, pay. Capping bonuses, as the European Parliament is proposing, is not sensible as it merely encourages banks to boost salaries. A better idea is to require lenders to pay a big chunk of their managers’ compensation in the form of the bank’s own subordinated debt. If the bank then got into trouble, executives would lose a lot of money. That should concentrate their minds on better risk management.

Second, the industry is under-taxed. The best solution here is not the financial transaction or “Robin Hood” tax proposed by the European Commission. That wouldn’t make the industry safer. Better options are to impose VAT on financial services and require banks to pay a levy to the extent that they finance themselves with hot money – a tax that has so far only been adopted in some countries.

Third, boards have too often failed to hold powerful executives to account. That was a big weakness at Barclays and other banks such as Britain’s RBS. Both regulators and shareholders need to insist that bank boards have more clout.

If the existing regulatory package was supplemented along these lines, some of the public’s indignation would be sated. There would also be less chance of the industry running amok in the future.

A year ago Rupert Murdoch was probably the most powerful unelected person operating in Britain. The media baron could seemingly choose prime ministers. Then came the phone hacking and police bribery scandal, after which politicians sought to distance themselves from him.

The title of most powerful unelected Briton now probably belongs to Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England. Witness the way he dispatched Barclays’ chief executive Bob Diamond two weeks ago in connection with the Libor rate-rigging scandal. Whoever succeeds King next year will have even greater powers. After all, responsibility for financial stability and banking supervision is about to be added to the central bank’s main task of running monetary policy. It’s vital for democracy that this authority is exercised effectively, transparently and fairly.

Who will be King’s successor when he steps down? And how will the new governor be made accountable? These questions have been brought into sharp relief by the Libor scandal. The front runner for King’s job has seen his chances knocked, while doubts have been raised about the central bank’s effectiveness and transparency.

The next governor will need to be something of a superman. Expertise in how to manage financial crises is probably the top requirement given that the euro could blow up and there wouldn’t be time for on-the-job learning. Strong management skills are also important as failure to delegate effectively would lead the incumbent to be swamped. Finally, the governor will have to be a good communicator.

Until the Libor scandal broke, Paul Tucker, one of the BoE’s deputy governors, was the favourite. He has a strong track record as a crisis manager. But his apparent failure to recognise early warnings that the Libor interest rate was being rigged has made him look naive.

Another candidate is Adair Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, a large chunk of whose functions are about to be merged into the central bank. Although the FSA hasn’t covered itself with glory in investigating the Libor affair, most of the abuses occurred before Turner took the helm.

Both men will be grilled by members of parliament this week, Tucker for the second time. If neither impresses, the field will be wide open for other candidates like Gus O’Donnell, formerly Britain’s top civil servant, and Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada.

Holding the next governor accountable will be as important as choosing one. The Bank of England was rightly given considerable independence in 1997 to prevent politicians meddling in monetary policy in order to advance their electoral interests. But the institution and its leader have slipped up on enough occasions that leaving them entirely to their own devices isn’t a good option either.

For example, King didn’t sound the alarm loudly enough during the credit bubble and was slow to act when there was a run on Northern Rock, the mortgage bank, in 2007. He then long resisted any investigations into the Bank of England’s own failings in managing the crisis. Now its hands-off approach to the Libor scandal is being revealed.

Based purely on its record, the central bank wouldn’t be receiving extra powers. However, the Conservative-led government has tried to pin the blame for the credit crunch on the previous Labour government’s policies – in particular, its decision to take away the central bank’s responsibility for banking supervision. Hence, it has become politically convenient to reverse that move.

Given this, the priority should be to enhance the Bank of England’s accountability. Under the current system, the government sets inflation targets and picks the governor. It also chooses the deputy governors and members of two committees: the monetary policy committee which sets interest rates; and the financial policy committee which will soon be responsible for financial stability. Their independent members help prevent the governor becoming too dominant.

The Bank of England also has a board, called the Court. But this has been largely ineffective. Though it has recently stepped up its scrutiny of the central bank’s executives, it is hamstrung because it rightly has no say over policy or who is the governor.

Meanwhile, parliament can call the governor and other senior officials in to give evidence. Although this is a potentially important check to the central bank’s power, MPs haven’t yet used this tool effectively. Take the ongoing hearings over the Libor scandal. They did a poor job of interrogating Diamond, failing to coordinate their questions and seeming more intent on grabbing headlines than getting to the truth. While the subsequent sessions were better planned, they were still not penetrating enough.

MPs have a chance to raise their game in this week’s hearings. A key line of questioning ought to be how exactly King managed to persuade Barclays to get rid of Diamond. Few people will shed tears at Diamond’s departure given that he epitomised the City of London’s greed. But the FSA – not the central bank – is still Barclays’ primary regulator. Parliamentarians should satisfy themselves that the governor did not overstep his authority.

One way of improving democratic control would be to give MPs the right to hold nomination hearings and, in extremis, reject the government’s choice for governor and other top positions. Indeed, that’s what parliamentarians want. But the government is resisting. If MPs are to change its mind, they must first show they are up to the job.

It won’t just be the Bank of England on trial this week. Parliament too will be in the dock.

Was Bob Diamond really irreplaceable? Barclays’ board operated for 15 years on the assumption that he was. As a result, the UK bank’s chief executive became more powerful – and ever harder to replace. Now that he has been kicked out in the wake of the Libor rate-rigging scandal, Barclays is struggling to find new leadership.

This is an object lesson for all companies, not just banks. Think of two other UK-listed groups which have recently provoked shareholder anger over their bosses’ high pay packages: WPP, the advertising giant; and miner Xstrata. In both cases, the boards paid their chief executives so much because they thought they were indispensable.

Barclays is now in a mess. Not only has Diamond quit, his chairman, Marcus Agius, has also said he will resign. Both men ultimately had to go: Diamond had come to epitomise the worst of the City of London’s greed, while Agius seemed unable to hold his chief executive in check. Neither man responded to requests for comment.

The manner of their going means the bank is now rudderless at a time when a political storm is swirling around it and a financial crisis is bubbling across the English Channel.

It will be hard to find a good candidate to replace Diamond, given that Barclays has now become a political football and the next boss will have to put up with intense media scrutiny. Attracting a good chairman won’t be easy either, although the deputy chairman, Michael Rake, seems prepared to step into the breach.

Diamond was undoubtedly an entrepreneurial banker. When he took over Barclays Capital in late 1997, the lender’s investment banking unit had 135 billion pounds in assets and made 252 million pounds in pre-tax profit. By last year, assets were 1.2 trillion pounds and profit was 3 billion pounds.

This dramatic growth was largely a function of two factors: the multi-year credit boom that lasted until 2007; and Diamond’s ability to persuade the Barclays board to pour resources into investment banking. This expansion continued after the crunch, when the bank acquired the largest chunk of Lehman Brothers out of bankruptcy.

Barclays’ share price performance, however, has been miserable, more than halving over the near-15 year period. During that time, Diamond and his key lieutenants received hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation. Diamond himself has earned at least 120 million pounds since he joined the board in 2005, according to Manifest, the corporate governance group.

Diamond ran BarCap as a fiefdom, with seemingly little oversight from a series of chairmen and chief executives at the parent bank. Despite the successes, there were problems: sometimes excessive risks were run; the organisation developed fiendishly complicated tax-minimisation schemes for its clients that went right to the border of what was legal; and, of course, it has now emerged that some Barclays traders attempted to manipulate Libor.

Diamond’s first slip came in 1998 when BarCap expanded its exposure to Russia just before the Kremlin defaulted and devalued. But Barclays kept him on, fearing that the investment bank would be too fragile if he quit. The idea of Diamond the indispensable was born.

Over the next six years, BarCap expanded so rapidly that Diamond was considered a candidate to be the next Barclays chief executive. In the end, the board chose John Varley. But directors were worried that Diamond would leave and, soon afterwards, gave him the title of president of Barclays in addition to that of BarCap chief executive. That seems to have undermined Varley’s authority.

When Varley retired at the end of 2010, BarCap was contributing 79 percent of the whole bank’s profit and Diamond was the obvious successor. He then became an even more dominant force in the bank.

In theory, a strong chairman could have acted as a counterweight. But, in Agius, Barclays doesn’t seem to have had such a chairman. This became apparent when Diamond was awarded 80 percent of his bonus for last year despite himself describing the results as unacceptable. Almost 27 percent of shareholders voted against the Barclays remuneration report.

The fiasco over this year’s pay finally persuaded Barclays’ non-executive directors that they needed a new chairman. They told Agius that they wanted him to step down at next year’s shareholder meeting. But before they could implement the plan, the Libor scandal blew up.

The board initially decided to hang onto Diamond – in part because there was nobody obvious to replace him. His two top lieutenants – Rich Ricci, BarCap’s chief executive, and Jerry Del Missier, Barclays’ chief operating officer – were both part of the same brash culture and out of tune with the current zeitgeist.

Agius himself decided to fall on his sword, seemingly thinking this would take the heat off Diamond even though the rate-rigging was an operational matter and so nothing to do with the chairman. But the Bank of England made clear this was not the right response and that Diamond would have to go.

Agius is, therefore, hanging on and running the executive committee on a stopgap basis even though he doesn’t appear to have the necessary skills. Meanwhile, the bank is looking for both a new chairman and chief executive.

And the moral of the story? Boards must always counterbalance strong chief executives with strong chairmen and have good succession plans in place. Most importantly, they should never treat anybody as indispensable – in case that is what they become.

Some European policymakers are talking about a “banking union” for the euro zone as if it was around the corner. Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, for example, told the Financial Times last week that such a union – which would involve euro-wide supervision, bailouts and deposit insurance for the banking industry – could be achieved next year.

But this is not remotely likely. Parts of the zone’s banking industry are so rotten that taxpayers elsewhere can’t reasonably be asked to bear the burden of bailing them out. A massive cleanup is required first. The crisis in Greece, Spain and other countries may provide the impetus. But even then, as Germany suggests, banking union should proceed in stages.

The appeal of a euro zone banking union is understandable. Governments and lenders are currently roped together in what has been dubbed the sovereign-bank doom loop. Weak banks – for example those in Spain, Ireland and Cyprus – can drag down their governments when they need a bailout. Equally, weak governments, such as Greece’s, can drag down their banks when those are stuffed with their own sovereigns’ bonds. By shifting responsibility for bailouts to the euro zone as a whole, the loop could be cut. Or, at least, that is the hope.

The snag is that banks and their governments are entangled in a tight incestuous relationship. Some of Spain’s cajas, for example, made dubious loans to their directors, as well as financing politicians’ pet projects. And the ex-chairman of Bankia, which has required the mother of all bailouts, was a former finance minister. Conflicts of interest have also been rife in Ireland, Cyprus and Greece. Even supposedly virtuous Germany has suffered from incompetent Landesbanken, controlled by regional governments, whose boards are filled with political appointees.

Bank boards were often useless or worse. But the national supervisors who should have spotted the problems were not much better. And Europe’s initial attempts at cross-border banking supervision have been pathetic. A European-wide stress test in 2010 didn’t even bother to examine Anglo Irish, a cesspit of bad property loans which virtually bankrupted Dublin. Another test in July 2011 concluded that Spain’s banks were only 1.6 billion euros short of capital. Then another last October bumped the number up to 26 billion euros – but didn’t stress the lenders’ property loans. Finally, last weekend’s bailout came up with a hopefully more realistic figure: up to 100 billion euros.

Governments have given the European Banking Authority (EBA) inadequate authority to overrule national supervisors. Meanwhile, the domestic authorities always have an incentive to downplay the capital needs of their banks. So long as lenders are pronounced solvent, they can get liquidity from the European Central Bank. That way, governments can delay putting in any of their own money to bail out their domestic lenders.

Part of the “doom loop” involves banks stocking up on sovereign debt. That link has grown tighter in Italy and Spain in recent months as foreigners have stopped buying bonds, leaving domestic lenders to step into the breach. They got the money from the ECB. If governments really surrendered control of their banks to a tough supranational agency, it would be harder to engineer such a money-go-round.

Yet another problem is that governments are reluctant to inflict losses on bondholders. In Bankia’s case, there were an estimated 12 billion euros of subordinated debt and 8 billion euros of senior debt – or 20 billion euros in total. These have not suffered losses as part of the bailout. But unless there are haircuts for a bank’s own bondholders, is it reasonable to ask the taxpayers of a foreign country to fork out cash to bail out banks and their depositors?

All this means that for banking union to work effectively, there needs to be effective supervision as well as a system to bail in bondholders. Everyone agrees on this. The real debate is largely one of timing. The peripheral countries want a euro-wide system of bailouts and deposit insurance fast, as an answer to the current crisis. Germany is stressing the need to start with supervision.

Berlin is right that the clean-up has to come first. That may, of course, be accelerated by the crisis. Spain’s banking bailout gives the rest of the euro zone a golden opportunity to insist that its system of crony finance is swept away. The same goes for Cyprus, a haven for recycling dubious money from Russia and elsewhere, if it requires a bailout.

But the euro zone will also need to determine who will supervise banks. The EBA is a busted flush. So it would be best way to empower an institution that has credibility. The obvious candidate is the ECB – an idea Germany’s Angela Merkel backed last week. But even that could be problematic: giving the ECB responsibility for supervision as well as monetary policy would concentrate a huge amount of power in a single body. Even it might struggle to monitor banks over such a vast area.

Then, of course, a system for bailing in bondholders needs to be crafted. Although the European Commission this month proposed a plan, it is not supposed to kick in until 2018. Finally, there is the question of how governments in trouble will finance their debts if they can no longer lean on their banks. Nobody yet has a good answer to this.

The banking union train may be about to leave the station. But it will take years to reach its destination.

Does Europe need a “banking union” to shore up its struggling monetary union? And is it going to get one?

These questions are raised by the increasingly lively debate over how to break the link between troubled states in the euro zone periphery and their equally troubled banks. In some countries, such as Ireland, the lenders have made so many bad loans that they have had to be bailed out – in turn, dragging down their governments. In Greece and Italy, the banks have gorged on so many government bonds that they have been damaged by their state’s deteriorating creditworthiness. And, in Spain, the current focus of the euro crisis, a bit of both has been happening: banks made too many bad loans – and then bought too many government bonds.

One proposed solution to this incestuous relationship, advocated among others by the International Monetary Fund, involves creating a centralised Europe-wide system for regulating banks and, if necessary, closing them down and paying off their depositors. The idea is that the region’s lenders would be viewed as European banks rather than Spanish, Greek or Italian ones. If they got into trouble, they wouldn’t infect their governments; and vice versa. That would make the whole euro crisis easier to manage.

While the idea carries much theoretical appeal, such a fully-fledged banking union isn’t realistic. The incestuous embrace between governments and banks may be unhealthy, but that doesn’t mean politicians entirely dislike it. National oversight of lenders gives politicians all sorts of ways of meddling in their economies. And this is not just in the troubled countries. Relatively healthy states such as Germany and France would be loath to surrender the power to boss around banks to some supra-national authority.

Citizens in rich states wouldn’t like the idea of having to bail out banks that had gone on a binge in a completely different part of Europe either. What’s more, even if a centralised banking body was created, would it really have the clout to tell the big boys what to do?

A further difficulty concerns whether such a banking union should stretch across the euro zone or the entire European Union, which includes the United Kingdom, home to the region’s largest financial centre. Britain would argue that it shouldn’t be roped into a system that is designed to shore up the single currency it is not a part of. On the other hand, if the euro countries went ahead on their own, the single market in financial services would fragment.

Quite apart from the politics, a banking union wouldn’t actually solve all the problems. In particular, it would do nothing to stop banks owning too much government debt. Indeed, in the last few months, Spanish and Italian lenders have bought even more of this debt – using cheap money from the European Central Bank. This has helped finance their governments through a rough patch but at the cost of tying the banks’ fate even more closely to that of their countries. Over time, governments ought to be weaned off reliance on their local banks. But, realistically, this isn’t going to happen fast.

Does this mean that a European banking union is a totally dead idea? Not quite. It may be possible to cherry-pick bits of it. The most important part would be to create a Europe-wide “resolution” regime. The basic idea is that such a regime would allow insolvent banks to go bust in a controlled fashion. If shareholders haven’t put in enough capital, bondholders have to be “bailed in”. Only if bondholders also haven’t put in enough capital do deposit guarantee schemes – and possibly taxpayers – have to be activated to make sure savers are repaid. With such a framework, governments such as Ireland’s wouldn’t in future be infected by their lenders’ problems.

At present, many European countries lack such a resolution regime and those that do exist don’t collaborate effectively with one another. What’s more, until recently the European Central Bank has been hostile to the idea that bank bondholders should suffer any losses. It prevented Dublin from bailing in bondholders, fearing that this would trigger contagion.

The mood, though, is changing. The European Commission is planning to publish plans for an EU-wide resolution regime in June. Even the ECB has started lending its support to such a scheme. The devil, of course, will be in the detail. But there finally seems to be momentum behind this proposal.

A second idea that could be cherry-picked is to reinforce Europe’s deposit guarantee schemes. At the moment, every country has its own. The problem is that depositors in weak countries, especially Greece, don’t have confidence that their national schemes have enough money to pay out. So savers have been taking their cash abroad.

It is too much to expect that Germany, Europe’s paymaster, would agree to a euro-wide deposit insurance scheme. But what about some sort of reinsurance scheme? Nicolas Veron from the Bruegel think tank argues that the European Stability Mechanism, the euro zone’s soon-to-be-created bailout fund, could provide national schemes with a backstop.

Europe is not ready for banking union any more than it is ready for political union. But such ideas show there are practical ways of limiting the unhealthy nexus between lenders and their governments. Europe should grasp them.

Bailout may not be a four-letter word. But many of the rescue operations mounted to save banks and governments in the past few years have been four-letter acronyms. Think of the TARP and TALF programmes that were used to bail out the U.S. banking system after Lehman Brothers went bust. Or the European Central Bank’s LTRO, the longer-term refinancing operation. This has involved lending European banks 1 trillion euros for three years at an extraordinarily low interest rate of 1 percent.

The markets and the banks have jumped for joy in response to all this liquidity being sprayed around. So have Italy and Spain, whose borrowing costs have dropped because their banks have been able to take cheap cash from the ECB and recycle it into their governments’ bonds — making a profit on the round trip. But as has been the case with other four-letter bailouts, the LTRO has come in for criticism — most of it a variation on the theme that the way to treat debt junkies isn’t to give them another heroin injection.

One problem is that European governments could now feel less pressure to reform their labour laws and do the other painful things that are needed to get their economies fit. Another is that banks may delay actions that are required to let them stand on their own two feet: such as rebuilding their capital buffers and raising their own longer-term funds on the markets.

As if this were not bad enough, undeserving banks will be able to make bumper profits on the back of the ECB’s cheap money and, potentially, route them into fat compensation packages — although two British banks, Barclays and HSBC, have said they won’t allow bonuses to be inflated in this way. Meanwhile, the ECB could incur losses if the commercial banks that have borrowed all this money can’t pay it back and the collateral they have pledged turns out to be insufficiently valuable. Oh, and don’t forget that this is just a three-year operation. There could be another crisis when the banks need to find 1 trillion euros to repay the ECB in 2015.

The charge sheet is a long one. But the LTRO was a necessary evil. Just think back to early December when panic was stalking the euro zone. Without some form of bailout, there would have been a severe credit crunch that would have dragged the economy into a deep recession rather than the mild one it now seems likely to suffer. Large countries such as Italy and Spain could also have easily been shut out of the markets, potentially leading to a break-up of the single currency.

The ECB faced a too-big-to-fail problem. If it didn’t bail out the system, it would be faced with catastrophe; if it did, it would reward foolish behaviour. One can argue with the details. Did the money, for example, really need to be so cheap? But the central bank made a rational choice. The priority now is to limit the bad side-effects.

Mario Draghi, the ECB president, has made a start by telling European Union leaders at their summit last week that the three-year cash injection would not be repeated, according to Reuters. He said it had merely bought the euro zone time and it was essential that structural reforms were pushed through.

Hopefully, such lectures will be sufficient to do the job. But countries rarely reform unless their backs are to the wall. Take Italy. Mario Monti has made a remarkable start pushing through pension changes and liberalising services since taking over from Silvio Berlusconi. But there is much left to do: freeing up the labour market, privatising assets, revamping public spending and fighting tax evasion. How easy will he find it to push all that through now that Italy’s 10-year borrowing costs are below 5 percent?

Similar points can be made about Spain, where Mariano Rajoy’s reform programme has only just begun. Meanwhile, France, which has so far largely escaped the crisis, will not be under pressure to address its deep-seated labour market and pension problems. Francois Hollande, the socialist who will probably be the country’s next president, certainly has no ideological desire to do so.

But won’t the new European fiscal treaty deal with the issue? Sadly not. The demand for fiscal austerity was, indeed, the quid pro quo for the ECB’s bailout. But it was the wrong sort of conditionality. Balancing budgets is not the same as structural reform. The only thing pushing Europe’s governments down the latter route is exhortation and the warning that there won’t be any more bailouts.

With the banks, more tools are available to mitigate the damage from the LTRO. After all, governments, the ECB and regulators can tell lenders what to do. The most important changes – requiring them to build stronger capital bases and rely less on short-term funding — are already under way. The key thing will be to resist lobbying to delay and dilute these rules.

But there is also a case for revisiting the industry’s lax tax regime, especially if compensation remains high. Politicians have given most of their attention to taxing financial transactions, the so-called Tobin tax. But a better alternative could be to introduce what is known as a financial activities tax or FAT tax. Most countries do not apply VAT to banking. FAT, which would tax profits and compensation, would do a similar job. A three-letter tax could be part of the answer to a four-letter bailout.

There was a whiff of the lynch mob in the UK last week. Stephen Hester, the current Royal Bank of Scotland boss, was bludgeoned by politicians and the media into foregoing his bonus even though he was brought in to clean up the largely state-owned bank. Two days later his predecessor, Fred Goodwin, was stripped of his knighthood. While Goodwin bore much of the responsibility for RBS’s near-bankruptcy, removing his title flouted normal procedures. Not only is such a dressing down traditionally reserved for criminals; the prime minister, David Cameron, prejudged the verdict of the committee which reviewed the knighthood. The week was capped off by the leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband, calling for a tax on bankers’ bonuses.

While the UK is currently the epicentre of the backlash against financiers, the phenomenon is widespread across the Western world. Francois Hollande, who is likely to be France’s next president, has said that his main adversary isn’t Nicolas Sarkozy but a faceless, nameless, opponent – the world of finance. And across the Atlantic, the only serious setback in Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign so far came when he revealed that in 2010 he had paid only 13.9 percent tax on his $21.7 million of income, most of which came from his time as a private equity baron.

There is certainly something ugly about the way politicians – who themselves bear some responsibility for the economic mess – have turned bankers into a scapegoats. But the public isn’t in the mood to show sympathy to bankers these days. The issue is not so much the amounts they are paid. In the same week that the banker backlash was gathering force in the UK, Facebook announced its initial public offering. Nobody batted an eyelid at the prospect of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, being worth over $20 billion. The difference is that people think Zuckerberg deserves his billions but the bankers don’t deserve their millions.

The belief that bankers’ compensation is unfair operates at several levels. At its most basic there is the argument that, since bankers were the ones who got the world into its current mess, they shouldn’t still be coining it. This is simplistic. The mistakes made by banks were only one factor that fuelled the crisis – and many individual bankers were innocent of the mistakes.

There is, though, a more sophisticated critique: that the whole system has been rigged in financiers’ favour, allowing them to earn more than they merit. Few people complain when entrepreneurs make millions. They are seen to have come up with brilliant ideas, taken big risks or worked extremely hard. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work. But bankers have benefited from one-way bets that make a mockery of capitalism.

The system has been skewed in bankers’ favour in two main ways. First, individual traders were paid on short-term performance. That encouraged them to spin the roulette wheel. If their bets paid off, they did well; if not, their employers picked up the tab. Second, banks in general were highly leveraged. This magnified earnings and bonus pools during the good times; but when the crisis hit, many banks were bailed out.

Over the past four years, regulators have been trying to remove these one-way bets. Much has changed in the way individual bankers are paid. A bigger slice of their bonuses is paid in equity which they cannot sell for several years, tying compensation to institutions’ long-term performance. In some cases, bonuses can be clawed back. What’s more, banks have been required to cut their leverage. This, combined with the dire economic environment, has reduced earnings and so squeezed bonus pools.

But compensation hasn’t come down as rapidly as it should have. Just look at bonuses in the City of London as measured by the Centre for Economics and Business Research. These actually rose slightly in 2007/2008 to 11.6 billion pounds after the first shocks of the crisis. Although they fell to 5.3 billion pounds after Lehman Brothers went bust, they rose again the following year to 7.3 billion pounds as the benefits of the bailout started kicking in.

For the year just ended, City bonuses are forecast to be 4.2 billion pounds. Even so, compensation is still too high. One way of seeing this is to compare how well bankers do to how well their own shareholders fare. Last year, for example, Goldman Sachs cut its pay 21 percent. But earnings applicable to shareholders tumbled 67 percent and the bank’s return on equity was a measly 3.7 percent.

The public’s concern, however, should be for taxpayers rather than shareholders. Although steps have been taken to make the system safer, the changes are far from complete. Banks are being given several years to build up fatter capital buffers so that they are better able to withstand losses. Plans to enable regulators to pack banks off to the knackers’ yard rather than bail them out when they get into trouble are still on the drawing board. Meanwhile, the industry enjoys special treatment. Just think about the 500 billion euros that the European Central Bank lent to the industry in December at a measly interest rate of 1 percent. Entrepreneurs would die to be able to borrow money at such a rate.

The sad fact is that most banks are still too big to fail. Until that changes, the system will remain rigged in bankers’ favour – and they will be vulnerable to the kind of lynching suffered by Hester and Goodwin last week.

To: Barack Obama
From: Humboldt Pye, Chairman of First Reform Bank

Dear Mr. President:

I’m writing an open letter to you and other G20 leaders on behalf of the chairmen of the world’s leading banks to say sorry.

We do not think banks are to blame for every ill the world currently faces, as the Occupy Wall Street protests and their kin in other countries suggest. A balanced audit would attribute responsibility to policymakers too: you and your predecessors set the rules of the game that we so craftily exploited. Even the public had a hand in the current mess: excess spending in some countries and inadequate taxpaying in others allowed people to consume too much.

But we are not in a position to lecture the rest of society. During the bubble years, we focused first on our own pay packages and then on profits for our shareholders. Insofar as we thought about the wider interest, we comforted ourselves with the belief that financial markets were efficient and free markets were the best way of generating wealth. So, as we pursued our self-interest, the world must by definition get better.

There were many flaws in this intellectual edifice. But contrary to popular belief, the weakness was not so much the failure of the market as the failure to apply the market. Central banks, especially the U.S. Federal Reserve, were always cutting interest rates at the first sign of trouble. The belief that Nanny was always there to rescue the markets lulled us into taking excessive risks. Second, the notion that governments would always bail out banks meant our bondholders didn’t bother to rein us in. Finally, our compensation practices amounted to “heads I win, tails you lose” bets. If our gambles paid off, we went laughing all the way to the bank. If they didn’t, the tab was ultimately left with taxpayers.

Our apology, though, can’t stop here. How we behaved after the bubble burst was arguably even worse. If it wasn’t for the extraordinary government and central bank assistance we’ve received (and still enjoy), most of us would have gone bankrupt. Despite this, we have kept paying our staff mega packages.

Our greed has enraged the people. Countries have imposed special taxes on the industry and pretty much everywhere the regulatory noose has tightened. We are not so naive to think we can swim against this tide, but we have sought to delay and dilute the most significant changes to capital and liquidity rules, which really hit our bottom line.

We have tried especially hard to wriggle out of anything that smacks of nationalization. Those of us who haven’t avoided this fate have had tough controls imposed on bonuses and dividends. The rest of us have therefore preferred to do anything to escape the state’s embrace, such shrinking our balance sheets rapidly, which allows us to boost capital “ratios” without issuing extra equity. Given the binge of the bubble years, deleveraging is appropriate. But rushing the process is probably tightening credit conditions and worsening the economic difficulties.

During this whole process, we’ve communicated terribly. Not that even a great orator like you, Mr. President, would have found this easy. The public assumes that everything we say is self-serving. But a leadership vacuum compounded this problem. Most of us were too cowardly to speak up. The few who did got pilloried – like Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein when he made a bad taste joke about how he was doing “God’s work”.

That pretty much left JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon to fill the void. For a while, he did a valiant job of speaking up for the industry in a down-to-earth manner. But too many flattering profiles about how he was a latter-day John Pierpoint Morgan saving the financial system may have gone to his head. His verbal assault on the Bank of Canada governor, Mark Carney, at the International Monetary Fund meeting in September shocked even other bankers.

We would now like to press the reset button in our relationship with society. At the heart of this will be the regulatory regime you are developing – in particular, measures to make sure that no bank in the future is too big to fail. Our pledge is that we will cooperate as you institute these changes, rather than fight them every step of the way.

We will also try harder to explain what we do. If we can’t show how what we do helps society, we should stop doing it.

We do not, of course, expect the public to believe our protestations of better behavior. So our senior executives are foregoing bonuses for at least two years. We are also going to squeeze cash compensation for other staff. We hope the public will in time appreciate that this leopard can change its spots.

Yours sincerely,

Humboldt Pye