What basic skills are needed to be a successful ATC?

What skills are needed to be a top banker, and why are they so valuable?

• Bankers have been getting a lot of flak recently, and with good reason. People are outraged at the bonuses they are being paid even when their banks are needing taxpayer money to stay afloat. It has been suggested their earning should be tightly restricted until the taxpayer has been fully compensated. The counter argument to this is that restricting earning will force all the talented people to move to other counties. Now I'm not a banker so I'd like to know what special skills these people have that means there job couldn't be done by thousands of other people willing to work for far less. Granted you probably need decent maths skills and a wide knowledge of economic theory. You need good people skills and networking, plus the ability to communicate and persuade others to put faith in you. Are these skills so rare? Aren't there thousands of people qualified for that role. Am I missing something. I'm not just looking to bash bankers here, I'd be genuinely interested to hear from anyone with experience in the industry.

• Answer:

  The word 'banker' covers a lot of different activities but essentially the people who get big bonuses get them because they are 'rain makers'. That means they have created profits for the bank. They can do this in all sorts of ways but mostly they do it by taking risks, working terribly hard and getting lucky. They don't need any Maths skills or Economic theory, that is a canard. They need to be great sales people with fabulous amounts of energy and enthusiasm who can spot an opportunity and go for it. It is really no different from being a manufacturer of widgets except that the profit margins in banking have tended to be abnormally high in recent years because governments around the world have been keeping interest rates artificially low to finance their deficits.