BANKS SHOULD GO BUST!!
irrespective of the reasons, banks should never be bailed out. this is a capitalist, free-market system. their losses should never be paid for by the public purse, this has to be said?!
the hapless, fumbling and bumbling mr bean (aka "mervyn king") at the bank of england gave £350 billion pounds of OUR money to private, stateless, amoral, greedy bankers, just so they could lend it back to us at interest, for their profit. because they'd spent too long at the roulette wheel, they used it to rebuild their balance sheets and NOT lend into the economy. mr bean should have created a government bank and lent directly into the economy creating economic activity and jobs AND it was mr bean who kept credit way too cheap for way too long that created this frenzy for borrowing that was the cause of all this nonsense in the beginning! (..and let's not forget keeping house prices out of inflation calculations to make it seems not as much as it was, that's more or less fraud)
no bank, like no other business, should be allowed to get too big, it simply does not serve the interests of the british people or ANY market to have corporations get that large, it's bad for business. RBS should have died, it was it's own stupid fault.
as for adam applegarth at northern rock, he was a gambler who gambled on getting money not from deposits or assets, but the international credit markets and using that money to lend. when those markets froze, his business froze, he was an idiot. northern rock should have died.
i support protecting small depositors up to a point. 50k, maybe 100k i don't know, but the bank should have gone bust! "creative destruction" as prof niall furguson says. the space created in a forest canopy allows more nimble and agile trees (banks) to grow up in the space. by keeping these technically bankrupt and failed banks on PUBLIC MONEY life support we are simply wasting public money and harming the evolution of the financial sector in this country.
we are suffering a credit crunch in this country because we do not have competition in credit. the existing players have it all sown up so no one else can get in, and we are sitting here suffering. we should have arab banks, russian banks chinese banks, brazilian banks anyone, to come in and provide credit to us. if we had true credit competition, we'd have no credit squeeze. that wouldn't guarantee no slow down, but it wouldn't be as bad as it is.
it was mr beans boom that we are now suffering from. blame where blame is due, he's got off scot-free, no one is blaming him, but it's his fault!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
