It takes something for Hong Kong's capitalist-minded people to join the global wave of revulsion against banker bonuses.
Income inequality and lavish rewards for entrepreneurship have long been accepted here, but when some arrogant financial sector stars are still being lavishly rewarded for failure, echoes of the worldwide backlash against the bonus culture can rumble even here.
Investment houses have given up trying to justify the period just before the 2009 crash when compensation accounted for more than 60 per cent of revenue, up from a 'norm' of about 50 per cent, most of it going to a small group of traders.
Current moves on Wall Street are aimed at bringing that percentage down to about 30 per cent, but many investment houses, including those that were bailed out by the government, are still using compensation ratios that make no sense in other industries.
The bonus season in Europe and America was at its height in December, but here it tends to focus on the period before the Lunar New Year, when expectations were high. The data provider Dealogic estimated that total investment banking revenue in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, rose 56 per cent to US$12.2 billion last year.
And only the very deaf could have failed to hear the crescendo of controversy surrounding bonus payments when the Public Accountability Initiative, a US-based advocacy group, estimated that bonuses for last year would rise to US$156 billion worldwide, stirring memories of the halcyon bonus days of 2008-09. This was when, for example, Citigroup paid Andrew Hall, a star commodities trader, US$98 million, and, according to The Wall Street Journal, it was in that year that the 25 biggest Wall Street companies alone paid out US$135 billion in bonuses.
No one was expecting largesse of this order to come back last year, but Asian banks were doing notably better than their overseas counterparts. Bonus expectations were high, but the hopes of many were dashed by political pressure for reduced banker pay in the US and Europe, and self-regulating edicts from some of the major overseas players in the local market who have succumbed to such pressure.
