My fat profits help you, too!

My fat profits help you, too!

Maybe Barack Obama's eyes have, indeed, suddenly been opened to the need for reform of the financial sector.

But while he deliberates over the issue, the bankers continue to  present a solid front.

Bob Diamond, the president of Barclays, is the latest to warn of the dire consequences that must surely follow should his bonus sink to below the amount necessary to help him keep the makers of luxury yachts in work.

Diamond, warned today that Obama's plans to limit the size of banks would hit jobs, growth and global trade.

It's entirely appropriate that Diamond's comments came on the opening day of the world's greatest annual boondoggle, the expense account busting, picture-perfect goodtime "conference" for serious people, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Quite why Davos is portrayed as such an important event in the political calender (after all, no policy is made there) must remain a topic for another post.

But there's one opinion that I will venture ... no-one will dare puncture the bubble of self-importance with impertinent questions like "er ...  Bob ... have you been reading the news lately?"

For while the bankers strike poses designed to suggest grave concern about the future for working people, the International Labour Organisation tells us that the jobless rate is at record levels across the entire planet already.

The number of jobless worldwide reached nearly 212 million in 2009, following an unprecedented increase of 34 million compared to 2007.

And the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis – also known as the CPB - tell us that the recent crisis resulted in a similar disaster for global trade: World trade flows plummeted in the final months of 2008 and the early months of 2009, declining at the sharpest rate since the Great Depression and to the greatest extent since World War II.

So the worst case scenario is already upon us, and there's plenty of good analysis that suggests its cause was exactly the kind of regulatory environment that bankers like Diamond supported and created.

Maybe Obama would do better to ignore Davos completely when contemplating his policy.