ALLIANCE FO§ DEMOCRACY

Penalties for bankers

Politics is somehow simple: When elections are forthcoming, then campaigns and draft laws are suddenly needed, in order to push the herds of voters in the required direction. Such political acts occur again and again, and most are especially funny, for example that reported by Finance Minister Schäuble on the end of the crisis. And one such special comedy is the sanction which the government is now striving for, in order to impose a minor penalty on spendthrift bankers, if they have been careless enough to involve themselves in risky business. So far the government has turned a blind eye, and the losses of the banks have been transferred to the taxpayers, after all the money has to come from somewhere, although in times of elections, this is of course no longer quite as acceptable. The bankers, who have been held up as the true and only instigators of the crisis, and the true enemy. Political failures are to seen everywhere, but the faceless bankers, nobody knows them at all.
The package of legislation currently under debate should also help to prevent future financial crises. Well, if this is not a little hyped. All the Euro rescue measures have failed, the policy has failed completely and it is questionable whether such a poor little banker who perhaps spends a few years in prison as a result of the new law could have changed anything about that.
New tones and that of the Alliance for Democracy – hardly, but when talk about the rescue of the Euro ultimately mean its decline, and if politicians who have already failed because they were not able to create laws that corresponded to the times, but relied on laws and bent those laws as they saw fit in their own interests, then it can hardly be the banker who is now publicly pilloried.
Another aspect is the bonuses that bankers are to receive to the level of millions for good deals, these also fall under the future law, so that in future there should hardly be any more bonuses. The Alliance for Democracy finds this as amazing as Peer Steinbrück, who says: Banks are service-providers. (And at the latest when Steinbrück wrote this in his paper, it was clear that this must be a case of election propaganda!)
Now one might obtain the impression that banking business, i.e. the trading in money (whether sensible or senseless) would in this way become unattractive – no, there is no danger. Even if the law should make it through the Bundestag/Bundesrat, there are two things which must be considered: 1. The whole thing does not necessarily have to happen before the election. 2. The draft may be followed by many requests and proposed changes before its final version, so that in the end, everything actually remains just as it is, and with the consent of the government. But this too can change!
And so everything will change, so that everything can remain as it is.