"What you as the City of London have done for financial services, we as a government intend to do for the economy as a whole."
- Gordon Brown, Mansion House speech, June 2002.

Bloomberg reported rather excitedly last week that Goldman Sachs has retained its appeal to MBA students despite the bad press the brokerage company bank has received over the past year. In a recent survey of 6,207 MBA candidates by Universum Group, the great vampiric squid and financial services firm kept its fourth place in a poll rating students' "most attractive employers" behind, somewhat depressingly, consultants McKinsey and Bain & Co. Google was ranked first as most preferred prospective employer. MBA students can hardly be blamed for following the money, but one can legitimately ask why the opinions of MBA students are apparently so important given that MBA groupthink is surely one of the less examined factors behind the global financial crisis in the first place.

US President Obama last week took a leaf out of the UK anti-banker playbook and ignited his own jihad against the "obscene" bonus culture. Robert Jenkins of the London Business School articulated the problem well in a letter to the Financial Times:

"It would appear that when large banks do well, they are owned by their employees. When they falter, they are owned by their government. One would have thought that these institutions are owned by their shareholders. Well, we shall soon see..

"One investment trade body has warned that investors would not tolerate having to pay for bank employees' tax bills. They already have.

"The question now is, will investors and their agents do anything about it? They certainly should. Bank boards have mistaken taxpayer-enabled profits for value-creating performance. The government knows this. Bank employees know this. Investors must know this. In coming months investors will have an opportunity to hold bank directors accountable. Shareholders should stand up by voting directors down. It is time we knew who owns whom."

David Fuller's view Whatever else they say about Gordon Brown, he certainly succeeded with the intention stated above.