Yesterday we got the news that an interest cap will be applied to payday loans. It was welcome. One of the pressure points that swung policy was the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury who said his church would compete Wonga out of business.
Now the FT says this morning in an email:
There he is again.
It's obvious banking has failed. RBS, the Co-op, Wonga; the list in the last week or so is clear evidence. But it takes the Lords and Bishops to create the pressure for change.
Is that how bankrupt government has got in this country?
I tweeted this rather poor image photo I took on the House of Commons last night:
Forgive the quality: it's the content that matters. It seemed to say a lot, not least about a government that has done nothing to effectively regulate banks; an act of neglect for which we are all paying.
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As someone pointed out on Newsnight last night, Labour MP Stella Creasey should be recognised as the main mover on this.
I don’t think that banks have recovered from the recession in order for them to be regulated. Another way to look at the situation we are in. There are still many business in trouble. Still many families who have loans they cant service. Until recently property in many parts of the UK was lower than the mid 20000’s. These loans are on the banks books, the banks are always the last to leave a recession. The UK cant regulate them before they have improved.
This wouldn’t be the same banks from which the government bought hundreds of billions of pounds worth of bad loans and replaced then first with safe government gilts and then £375,000,000,000 worth of cash, would it? The latter supposedly to give the banks enough liquidity to lend to consumers and businesses again?
Yes….I believe it is!
Brave and courageous as Stella Creasey and I mean that with all sincerity, she needs a bit of help. Given The Archbishop’s credentials, he’ll be able to argue the business as well as the moral case.
It is a crying shame that those in Govenment are too weak to stand up to the vested interests.
At the top of the list is the “City of London”, which seeks to impose its particular brand of Fascist Corporatism. For the sake of the UK it’s time this anachronistic institution was stripped of its power and merged with the rest of London.
By all means leave the “Old Boy Network” to carry on ceremonial activities, but let’s ensure the City’s wings are clipped!
@Carol – the main mover regarding the lift?
(pardon the levity)
😉
“I don’t think that banks have recovered from the recession in order for them to be regulated”
Of course, there is the alternative viewpoint: That the banks reckless lending had a large part in the recession, along with their political footlickers.
Then:
” In this organised criminal category I include the various mis-selling cases, including pensions, PPI Insurance and interest rate swap derivatives; the criminal manipulation by Barclays and other banks of the LIBOR interest rate structures; the institutionalised level of money laundering as identified in the HSBC case; the serial abuse of the US sanctions provisions as indicated in the Standard Chartered Bank case; as well as many other examples of criminal actions such as theft of client funds, teeming and lading, abuse of client instructions, insider dealing, front running, churning, and market manipulation which have become the subject of international regulatory interventions”
http://rowans-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/you-couldnt-make-this-crap-up.html
They don’t need regulating?
You may be correct; They do need prosecuting though.
The archbishops ‘intervention’ on payday loans was a pledge to ‘compete them out of business’. It was not a call for regulation or for legislation or, in fact, for any action at all on the part of government. It was an offer to assist the credit unions in establishing a ‘free market’ alternative to deliver the same service at a lower cost and with a more ethical approach.
I think that credit unions are quite a way from being able to do that. They would need to co-operate on a regional/national level to build the systems necessary to deliver a service which is so different to what they currently do. However, I applauded the archbishop’s call for something better, rather than just lobbying for new laws… Because I’m not convinced that legislation solves the Wonga problem. Notwithstanding the new laws, I hope something comes from what the archbishop said.
So I’m not sure how you figure that his intervention ‘swung policy’, when the whole point of it was that he believed there was an answer which meant policy didn’t need to be swung.