“…if you’re earning £1m a year, after tax that’s £500,000; after the amount that’s in stock that you can’t access for three years, that’s £300,000; and you’ve got to educate three kids privately. Bankers aren’t wealthy any more”

Alex Preston in the New Statesman on the rise and fall of investment banking, tracing the history of IBs from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, through the rise of Barings and Rothchild, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs in the nineteenth century, 1929 and Glass-Steagall, the de-regulation of the 1980s and 1990s, the debt boom and the financial crisis, to the new challenges to investment banks – regulation, disintermediation, shadow banking and overwhelming public antipathy.

Start-ups and growth companies: new “owner-employee” contracts will swap employment rights for CGT-exempt shares

The Chancellor announced the outlines of a new type of employment contract today, the premise of which is that an employee will give up some employment rights in exchange for CGT-exempt shares in their employee.

The Treasury announcement is here and its main points are set out below. As to how these shares would interact with good leaver / bad leaver provisions, all the announcement says (at note 2) is that the forthcoming consultation on the new contract “will include the details of restrictions on forfeiture provisions to ensure that if an employee-owner leaves or is dismissed, the company is not able simply to take the shares back but is able to buy them back at a reasonable price”.

Treasury announcement: