And not just for the City of London.
Higher pay for bankers and in the middle of a cost of living crisis. The politics of this may not look good, but the economics behind this make sense and should be seen as a separate issue to the pay demands behind the recent rail strikes in the UK.
Last week Steve Barclay, the Cabinet Office Minister and Boris Johnson’s Chief of Staff, asked the Chancellor to introduce deregulatory measures to help businesses. Controversially, this included removing the cap on bankers’ bonuses.
This cap was introduced by the EU following the 2008 financial crisis. At the time, then Mayor of London Boris Johnson witheringly described the policy as “the most deluded measure to come from Europe since Diocletian tried to fix the price of groceries across the Roman Empire”.
He was right. Like many such interventions, rather than achieving its stated aims, the bonus cap simply ended up distorting the market.
It triggered a huge rise in basic pay for bankers and across the financial sector. The big firms and incumbents could afford this, but it made life harder for new entrants and the smaller, innovative and dynamic firms that the City needs.