I’m blogging with the sound of a television in the background.
Directline adverts really annoy me right now. This is about a 95% state owned insurance broker / supplier because it is 100% owned by RBS.
For heavens sake, let’s spin it out of RBS to RBS shareholders (plus or minus a cash adjustment or state minority stake — I suspect it is worth more than the bank right now) in exchange for nationalising the remainder of that bank.
They get a viable asset which might pay dividends.
We (through the state) get a banking business we can take to pieces, repackage and refloat in due course in a new form.
It’s a strategy so blindingly obvious it deeply annoys me no one is doing it. And massively cheaper than the toxic loan scheme.
I’m pretty sure the same could be done with Lloyds with little trouble.
Barclays too come to that.
This is the strategy we need to give ourselves the breathing space to rebuild banks.
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You are such an idiot, and anything that annoys you makes me happy.
Maggie
There’s nothing like constructive debate, is there?
Have a good day 🙂
Richard
We all know this, and that nationalising banks should have been on the menu 6 months ago, and that we would have had a lot less grief if that had been the case, if we had had a government that had that sort of leadership ability. Or if we had a government pushed by an Opposition that had that sort of ability. But we have had none of this, only more and more disaster.
Surely the fact that that has not occurred and that we have a government that is still pursuing cuckooland strategies as RomeUK burns, no warrants a long hard look at the cause.
The commitment to the free trade ethos, epitomised in trade agreements (nb still going ahead, at least in the bilateral form – and still unpublicised) is surely worth scrutiny as it is the phenomenon that is bringing this country at least, to destruction.
Yet there is still no naming, or focus on, this phoenomenon, overtly ideological, though obviously underpinned by money, in the form of transnational capital preferences.
Instead we continue to allow Brown to come up with useless phoney ideas to our cost, while we should be questioning that ethos, centre stage.
Too true, the banks should have been properly nationalised and taken under direct state control months ago, not be effectively owned by the government but still left under the control of the same banking establishment that brought about the current disastrous situation. I’ve just heard of the latest ‘attempt’ by the US government to get the banks functioning again whereby yet more stupendous amounts of taxpayers’ money are to be used to write off toxic debt and encourage (bribe?) private investors to invest in the banks, to restore confidence.
Why can’t the US and UK governments see that the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism is bust?