candidly, just between you and me i’m getting a bit sick of this recession. so much so that, unaccustomed as i am to taking sides in an argument i think it’s about time to start handing out some blame.
but where to start? the field of potential targets is so broad and slow-moving it’s tempting to just pick-off the easiest first, so i will 🙂
okay then, let’s bag the bankers. back in the day a bank manager was as boring as a wet weekend in wigan. in fact boring was part of his job specification. (these days, what passes for a bank manager is almost certainly a sad, 25 watt, wet-behind-the-ears kid in an equally sad 100 watt suit, but these creatures are so far down the food chain that we’ve done ourselves a disservice even to have mentioned them).
no, the boys were interested in here are the savile row suited chief executives of banks, along with their fellow board members: those with reponsibility for setting strategy including lending policy and just as importantly the funding arrangements which will facilitate and support those lendings.
in simple terms, instead of referring to the tried-and-tested system which related bank lendings to their balance sheets and which had saved banks from their own stupidity for centuries, these flash idiots (1) lent money the didn’t have in vast quantities to people who (2) could not repay it. whoops, it’s all over!
of course between (1) and (2) there’s a period when everything looks just ginger-peachy which is when these grasping creatures bag their bonuses.
hang ’em up with piano wire. next?
ah yes, the fsa. a sloppy toothless dog of an outfit armed and ready with brown’s patent light-touch system of regulation.
a complete waste of time and space. shut it down and let them get proper jobs. next?
step-up the bank of england: what do they do for a living? neither do i! put ’em out to grass. next?
and finally, the government, who must without doubt shoulder the lions share of the blame for this ruinous debacle. don’t listen to what brown tells you about this mess. never mind it’s a global recession and an international banking crisis, though of course it is.
take my word for it, at the heart of the uk’s woes are years of slack banking policy characterized by an unwillingness to increase interest rates, which year-on-year fuelled consumer borrowing to deranged levels. and all for fear of scaring the horses, which was exactly what the horses needed for their own good.
in short, our banks have been permitted, some might therefore say tacitly encouraged to get away with lousy, casino-style lending/funding policies which would have had the proper bank manager i mentioned earlier rotating in his grave.
and what do you expect if you allow pigs unhindered access to the trough?
don’t forget that these years of unsustainable spiral accelerating to inevitable implosion were accompanied, day-in, day-out by brown’s smug “no return to boom and bust” mantra. so pathetic.
the fact that he knows all of the above and yet has the brass-neck to remain in his job says so much about brown i think i’ll just bugger-off and leave it at that. next?
let me see. oh dear, i appear to have run out of low-hanging fruit. still all good things etc; and they were yummy.
caio for now basket cases 😉