WHY are chief executives and bank bosses receiving huge bonuses when they are already being paid big salaries?

There are still thousands of British and migrant workers who only earn the minimum wage, and many pensioners are struggling on a low income.

Let us hope this present government is going to keep its promise by looking into this subject of big bonus earnings.

Roland Bramham, Richmond.

BANKERS, like Barclays’ chief Bob Diamond, who urge us to “move on” from the bonus issue are right (Echo, Jan 12).

It is not the bonuses we should be focusing on, but the artificial profits these bonuses are based upon.

We all know that the majority of financial transactions in the City have nothing to do with financing trades in goods and services. They are pure speculation, or gambling, if you prefer.

Through the use of interest rate swaps and other derivatives, massive bank-to-bank financial transactions can be manipulated by a small elite.

Bank profits are boosted by massively increasing the cost of banking overall just by the sheer number of transactions and the shepherding of the resulting profit into the investment banking arms of these banks.

The winners are the international banking elite who justify their bonuses on the back of these manufactured trades.

The losers are the customers, including investors, who get higher costs and lower returns.

The fact that investors do not complain about these lower returns shows just how profitable banking can be.

Eventually these manufactured trades get so complex, and the artificial profits so high, that the whole system collapses, but by this time these banks are “too big to fail” and gullible governments step in to bail them out.

Governments need to work together to call the bankers’ bluff by introducing a punitive Tobin tax on speculative transactions, as well as outlawing artificially created trades which benefit no one except the bankers themselves.

Leslie Rowe, Richmond