Finance: Please Get Off the Front Page
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For weeks, the headlines have been dominated by predominantly bad news about bank failures and market turmoil. Could we all please just go back to our old ways of making money in secret and without a lot of fuss?
The finance industry is not necessarily the career of choice if you are after fame and followers. Some of the highest paid individuals in the industry have hardly ever been heard of - apart from the obligatory annual headlines about bumper bonuses which now seem to well and truly belong to the past.
Bankers are not usually front page material, nor do they want to be. They want to silently go about their business and rake in the millions during the day, then retreat to their private members bar in the West End, have a low-key dinner at Clarke's, or simply sit down quietly in their Chelsea townhouse without heaps of photographers waiting outside on the pavement.
And once they have made it to retirement, ideally around the age of 40, they strive for even more privacy, leaving the urban distractions behind in favour of private islands in the Caribbean.
Most certainly however, bankers do not want to find themselves, or their industry, on the front page of the papers every day. They do not want to face hordes of journalists when they leave their office, either after work or when they have been called in on the weekend to pack up their worldly possessions.
Unfortunately, there has been hardly a day recently where banking has not been front page news.
Suddenly, products investors were very happy to not really understand need to be explained and analysed in depth. Past bonus payments are brandished as excesses rather than the legitimate incentives they were. Bankers are implicitly (or explicitly) made responsible for the general economic downturn, and for large bills the taxpayer might have to shoulder.
And all this with little or no compassion for the fact that bankers will this suffer severe pay cuts, to a much larger extent than the average employee does.
I realised the absurd level of publicity when I received an e-mail from my ex-wife who was getting concerned about the financial crisis and my well-being. She had never shown any interest in banking before, and certainly had not been overly interested in my happiness, but the level of news coverage - or fear about her alimony payments - seemed to make it necessary to inquire.
With the crisis that has been in the making for a while currently in full swing, the only hope bankers have of returning to their proverbial secrecy is for a bigger scandal to take over. Whether this is an Alaskan hockey mum moving into the White House or Premier League football clubs with their incident-ridden Christmas parties remains to be seen.
But either way, the general public and the right honourable members of the financial industry will be more than happy to see something other than sad traders on the front page.
Bankers are not usually front page material, nor do they want to be. They want to silently go about their business and rake in the millions during the day, then retreat to their private members bar in the West End, have a low-key dinner at Clarke's, or simply sit down quietly in their Chelsea townhouse without heaps of photographers waiting outside on the pavement.
And once they have made it to retirement, ideally around the age of 40, they strive for even more privacy, leaving the urban distractions behind in favour of private islands in the Caribbean.
Most certainly however, bankers do not want to find themselves, or their industry, on the front page of the papers every day. They do not want to face hordes of journalists when they leave their office, either after work or when they have been called in on the weekend to pack up their worldly possessions.
Unfortunately, there has been hardly a day recently where banking has not been front page news.
Suddenly, products investors were very happy to not really understand need to be explained and analysed in depth. Past bonus payments are brandished as excesses rather than the legitimate incentives they were. Bankers are implicitly (or explicitly) made responsible for the general economic downturn, and for large bills the taxpayer might have to shoulder.
And all this with little or no compassion for the fact that bankers will this suffer severe pay cuts, to a much larger extent than the average employee does.
I realised the absurd level of publicity when I received an e-mail from my ex-wife who was getting concerned about the financial crisis and my well-being. She had never shown any interest in banking before, and certainly had not been overly interested in my happiness, but the level of news coverage - or fear about her alimony payments - seemed to make it necessary to inquire.
With the crisis that has been in the making for a while currently in full swing, the only hope bankers have of returning to their proverbial secrecy is for a bigger scandal to take over. Whether this is an Alaskan hockey mum moving into the White House or Premier League football clubs with their incident-ridden Christmas parties remains to be seen.
But either way, the general public and the right honourable members of the financial industry will be more than happy to see something other than sad traders on the front page.
Here Is The Writer : Square Mylo
Square Mylo came to London with the intention of staying six months and never left. He has worked in Canary Wharf and in the Square Mile, but still maintains a clear conscience since he's never worked in Mayfair. Being a banker is his true calling. Maybe he should have listened more closely.
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