A cynic might suggest that 'morality in the marketplace' is an oxymoron. But even the most cynical would surely gasp at the audacity of Lord Griffiths, vice-chair of Goldman Sachs International, when he chose to speak on the topic this week in London.

Morality in the marketplace, according to this one-time adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is all about the public accepting that the inequality of huge salaries and bonuses for bankers creates prosperity for everyone. They are a longer-term investment in the British economy, he suggested, ensuring that high-earning bankers don't flit off to Switzerland with their wads of cash.

Goldman Sachs plans to spend a record $22bn (€14.6bn) in bonuses to employees this year. It has just reported spectacular third-quarter earnings of $3.19bn (€2.12bn). Financial crisis? What financial crisis?

Mere mortals, whose money bailed these banks out last year, may now find themselves out of a job and/or struggling to pay the mortgage, but for the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe of investment banking, it's business as usual. And if taxpayers force governments to stand in the way of their new mansions and yachts, then the taxpayers will never know prosperity again, they patiently explain.

In the investment banking world, risk appears to be a matter of heads I win, tails you lose.

"A great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," is how a feature in Rolling Stone this summer described the venerable institution that is Goldman Sachs.

The piece attributed every recent financial bubble -- from the dot com boom to the property crash to the scary rise in oil prices last year -- to the investment bank's activities.

It claimed Goldman Sachs sucked much of the public money aimed at boosting the fragile US economy onto its balance sheet and was plotting to create a new bubble in the coming green economy by dominating the market for carbon credits.

"If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain," writes the piece's author Matt Taibbi. He pointed out, as have many others, including the New York Times, just how many ex-Goldman employees came to be in powerful government positions in recent years.

Henry Paulson, the former US treasury secretary who let Lehman Brothers go to the wall while saving AIG (which owed Goldman Sachs millions), was a former CEO of the company.

His one-time predecessor during the Clinton years, Robert Rubin, was co-chair of Goldman. He is credited by some with fostering the lax regulation that facilitated last year's financial meltdown. For the record, chair of the World Bank Robert Zoellick was a managing director at Goldman's and several ex-Goldman employees now hold key positions under Obama.

It gives a whole new meaning to the term Masters of the Universe.

For the wider public, it is still something of a mystery as to what investment banks actually do and how they can justify paying such enormous bonuses to their employees. They have sometimes been described as the agents who connect those with money to those who need money, although needless to say the amounts in question are in the millions or billions.

For example, during the property boom, when it was a given that property prices would always rise, a bank giving mortgages to the so-called subprime sector -- people with a poor or non-existent history of repaying debts -- needed money to fund their activities. Investment bankers figured out a way of packaging these subprime mortgages with sounder investments and selling them on, to say, insurance or pension companies who were looking for a decent return in an era of historically low interest rates. For this, the investment bank earned a healthy fee.

So what are the likes of Goldman Sachs doing now to generate such astounding profits?

Companies and countries still need capital and investment banks can charge higher fees. It is true, too, that the big investment banks like Goldman Sachs have benefited not just from taxpayer bailouts but a change in lending rules. Goldman Sachs has paid back its bailout money but is now able to access cheap funding from the Federal Reserve. It also continues to take huge risks which means huge returns.

Even Boris Johnson, Conservative Lord Mayor of London and friend of the free market, is appalled by the bonuses being paid. "These banks can no longer talk glibly about the need to offer competitive salaries to star bankers, and the operation of the free market. Their irresponsibility almost brought the free market crashing to its knees. How can they pretend that the world hasn't changed? What blindness, what deafness, what Asperger's afflicts them?" he railed this week in his column in the Daily Telegraph.

No, lectures from Lord Smith on how inequality is good will not persuade hard-pressed taxpayers that the Masters of the Universe deserve a new pad in the South of France.

Mere mortals aren't idiots. At the very least, Lord Griffiths needs to make a tearful guest appearance on The X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing. In these difficult times, spontaneous prime-time emoting is the very least we expect from such sinners.

- Carissa Casey

Irish Independent