November 05, 2009

It is not exactly like Gordon Gekko and his “greed is good” speech from the movie “Wall Street,” but an increasing number of top European bankers are speaking up in moral tones in defense of their industry’s practices and paychecks.“Profit is not satanic,” John Varley, the chief executive of the British bank Barclays, told an audience in the St. Martin-in-the-Fields church in London on Tuesday.

In doing so, he became the latest banking executive to try to counter a growing social and political resentment directed at the sector for its part in bringing about a financial crisis that cost taxpayers billions of dollars.Mr. Varley did not dispute that banks played a role in the economic downturn, but he stressed that making money per se was not immoral. He said that banks were the “backbone” of the economy and that bonuses were necessary because “talent is highly mobile.”