Risk taking? Fat chance. This week the independent UK body researching issues related to pay, The High Pay Centre, published its annual analysis of CEO pay to reveal they are now paid 143 times as much as their staff. Meanwhile, the Telegraph business pages report that corporate giants and PE (Private Equity) firms have accumulated capital reserves amounting to £4.1 trillion. At the same time earnings in the UK have fallen by 10-12% in real terms since 2008, according to the Bank of England, and the Fawcett Society has released findings after questioning 1000 low-paid women that indicate that the gap between men’s and women’s pay has widened for the first time in five years. Is there any relationship between these facts? Possibly. Despite reports that the UK economy has recovered from the 2008 Great Recession, business and economic commentators, among them the Daily Telegraph’s Allister Heath, are arguing that it is still not sufficiently dynamic. Heath points to a combination of factors including that Government measures introduced to mitigate the recession’s effects have frozen parts of the economy so that people fear moving jobs, businesses are not investing and so-called zombie companies are being allowed to survive well past their effective life. He argues that a little “creative destruction” is required to really get things moving and that economies need to be in a state of permanent revolution in order to be successful. He may have a point, but while there is uncertainty about future direction of policy in the run-up to an election, not to mention so much unfinished bank and financial sector regulatory reform, an ongoing unease about the fairness and morality of the way our economic system is structured and currently operates and so much uncertainty about a possibly stagnating Eurozone ( the UK’s biggest export market) there are likely to continue to be more questions than answers and precious little appetite for risk taking of any sort. Those who have will hang on to what they have accumulated. Why should CEOs put their own salaries at risk by taking risks for the benefit of apathetic shareholders?
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 11:48:40 +0000
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