Bankers at four leading City firms will share an estimated £6.4 billion Christmas bonus pool as thousands of workers lose their jobs or go on to short time.

Regardless of bringing the world economy to the brink of bankruptcy, employees of London banks Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Dresdner Kleinwort are expecting huge year-end bonuses.

Banks justify the payouts to best performers by saying if they don’t give them top salaries they risk seeing them go to rivals.

Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs has 5,400 staff in London expecting a £50,0000 Christmas present from their employer, who will share a bonus pot of £1.7billion, even though it plunged to a £1.4billion loss in the fourth quarter.

Goldman had to accept a handout from the US government to keep trading.

Morgan Stanley’s 5,000 London staff are also expected to receive around £50,000 each. The US government handed the bank a $6.4 billion hand out earlier in the £9.7billion in emergency funding from other investors.

Merrill Lynch also came unstuck. Although it has had to be taken over by Bank of America, it has set aside £2billion for performance bonuses, some of which will go to London staff.

German investment bank Commerzbank is taking over rival Dresdner Kleinwort, yet Kleinwort is giving over £350million to bankers and trading staff in London and Frankfurt.

The High Street had some Christmas cheer as tills took slightly more than last week but are still down year-on-year.

The data comes from John Lewis, which publishes sales figures every Sunday based on the previous week’s data.

Their sales in the week to 20 December rose 1.3% from the previous week, but were down 1.8% year-on-year. The week before, takings were down 4% year-on-year.

On the markets, the FTSE ended the week on 4286.90, down 43.8 from opening the day at 4330.7. The DOW ended at 8579.11, down 27.39 from starting at 8606.50.

The pound ended a dismal week at 1.06 euros, down three cents on the day’s trading and down to $1.54 from $1.55.

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Tags: Bank, Bank of England, Banking, Dresdner Kleinwort, Financial News, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley