Salaries slide.. .
DRY your eyes, but I detect that City salaries are beginning to boil over. The international money and capital markets, based in London, first taught the natives what world-league salaries might be. Now leading firms in those markets are squeezed between falling profit margins and rising overheads (those ail-singing all-dancing dealing rooms at City rents and rates). The squeeze is going through to the pay packets. The markets' specialist paper Euroweek has been surveying salaries as they are now and as they were ten months ago. So you always wanted to be a Euro- bond syndicate manager? Last year a top-flight firm might have paid you £100,000 to £150,000: now, £65,000 to £100,000. Bond traders, the footsloggers of the business, are down from £75,000- £100,000 to 05,000-£70,000. Bond sales- men, the light cavalry, are down from £50,000475,000 to £30,000-£50,000. Simi- lar falls have overtaken the traders in convertibles, and floating rate notes, and swaps. The figures exclude bonuses. This year the harder-pressed areas of business will not generate many bonuses. Pay in domestic markets is likely to follow pay in international markets, down as well as up.
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