“Except for con men borrowing money they shouldn’t get and widows visiting handsome young men in the trust department, no sane person ever enjoys visiting a bank.”

-       Martin Mayer.

Lewis Carroll would have been proud. “Leading” London bankers are reported to be critical of relatively modest proposals to rein in their executive privileges and to make more transparent the earnings of their best paid employees. One naturally unnamed banker reportedly told the Financial Times,

“Risk should be managed by executives hour by hour, not by non-executives month to month.”

Banks’ risk should be managed, we can all agree on that. But it wasn’t. Not by senior bankers at any rate, many of whom are only enjoying the fruits of employment now thanks to the involuntary appropriation of taxpayer assets. If “leading” bankers want to avoid being kicked to death in the street by a mob they are doing their damnedest to outrage, they would do well to keep a lower, humbler, more discriminating and less obviously self-interested public profile. Some hope. More evidence of the ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’ world we now inhabit comes from Matt Taibbi’s much feted critique of Goldman Sachs. After the biggest banking bust in world history, the most trenchant criticism of investment banking (Rolling Stone’s “The Great American Bubble Machine” – warning: replete with some colourful expletives) has appeared in a rock magazine. Mr. Taibbi has also given us perhaps the most memorable description of an investment bank yet coined:

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