Chancellor George Osborne conceded today that changing the culture of British banks would be an extremely difficult task, admitting in an appearance before a Commons Select Committee that, ‘by virtue of banking being based on making large quantities of money, it will always be “an attractive proposition for greedy, avaricious, amoral dickbags”.
The Chancellor went on to explain his position further “a system based on excessive financial reward in the name of disastrously high-risk short-termism, will inevitably draw the sort of borderline-sociopaths that inhabit financial institutions across the globe”.
Citing a recent academic report from King’s University, Osborne identified the so-called ‘Dickhead Paradox’ as one of the major problems facing the banking sector. In the report, Professor John Anderson explains that “People who are drawn to the banking sector and are motivated by disproportionate financial rewards for morally dubious and borderline illegal behaviour, are by their nature ‘dickheads’. However attracting so called ‘non-dickheads’ to the profession will be prove to be extremely difficult, this is because of a phenomenon identified by Anderson and his team as ‘basic human decency’.
Osborne admitted that talk of judicial or parliamentary inquiries into the recent Libor scandal or the banking industry as a whole was entirely pointless. “The British does not need a public enquiry to establish what it already knows to be true. Banks are populated by cocaine and champagne fuelled arseholes whose moral compass appears to have had a magnet stuck on the back of it”.
