Obsequitariat

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Obsequitariat
/əˈbsiːkwɪˈteərɪət/ (n.)

The 99% who are in it for the ride, the crumbs and the crusts of bread that fall from the tables of the fortunate.

They who will swoon at the curated social media output of an ultra-high net worth wealth manager — topics, in order, including “financial literacy for women”, “black professional social networking”, “net zero carbon emissions”, “investment approaches to give the world’s women financial independence”, “the female workforce after COVID”, a white man speaking about gender diversity in leadership, “sustainable and impact investing”, “Black History Month”, the financial life-cycle of a woman, more about gender diversity, more about recruitment diversity — fairly quickly you get the drift — and not perhaps wonder whether this isn’t, to put it in the kindest way, a blatant misdirection from the real tale of catastrophe in the organisation?

To be sure, these are all laudable topics, of great currency, and is is doubtless true that the financial services industry has badly failed these constituencies, along with many others presently not quite so à la mode.

The point here is not to throw shade on these causes and the difficult issues they present — though they deserve a more careful and nuanced treatment than one can expect from a Twitter feed — but, in a time described elsewhere as the most crisis-ridden in the institution’s history —its COO literally committing espionage on his colleagues, multiple billion-dollar losses in a quick series of disastrous and utterly unrelated implosions, and then a half-billion dollar criminal enforcement for wire fraud, bribes and corruption against the government of Mozambique — to ask, “does this not suggest that this institution has rather taken its eye off the ball?”

Sustainable and impact investing is good — but how is it served, and how will Black History remember the time when when your executives were not trousering $50m in kickbacks at the expense of an African government? Recruitment diversity is important, but perhaps less so in terms of the quality of your loan book, the serial monster holes in which don’t seem to feature on your media feed.