Barclays: bonuses up, profits down
Despite falling profits at Barclays, the bank has seen fit to raise employee bonuses.
Barclays announced a 33% drop in pre-tax profits to £5.2bn for 2013. The drop reflects various legal provisions, a restructuring programme that will involve the loss of 12,000 jobs and a 37% decline in investment banking profits. Barclays' peers have also struggled.
Despite the poor results, the bonus pool grew by 10% to £2.4bn. The results followed the news that more than 2,000 customers had had their personal details stolen.
What the commentators said
The latest customer data theft could also prove pricey. Throw in this week's leak that forced the bank to release results early, and Barclays looks "too accident-prone an institution to be worthy of customer or investor trust".
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The executives' greed doesn't help, said Chris Blackhurst in The Independent. The old canard about banks being in a global market for talent, and so obliged to pay its people ridiculous sums to stop them defecting to rivals, was trotted out again.
Well, so good is Barclays' talent that it contributed to a 37% drop in Barclays' investment-banking division. Nor has Barclays, or any other bank, ever explained where "all these gaping vacancies" at rival banks actually are.
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Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.
After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.
His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.
Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.
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