The FT notes:
George Osborne will use the chancellor’s annual Mansion House speech to warn big banks that they will have to pay for the damage they inflicted on the British economy and could be broken up.
There’s another fault line for the ConDems.
But let’s not be churlish: if this one is delivered it will be good news.
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This is what I would like to see
George Osborne will use the chancellor’s annual Mansion House speech to warn
1. big banks that they will have to pay for the damage they inflicted on the British economy and could be broken up; and
2. the responsible officers and employees of them that they will have their personal enrichment above their base salary for the last six years recovered by seizure of their assets (including pension funds)
Roger – so you’d warn the institution but rob the individual? Sounds fair.
Splitting banks to better manage risk has been a LibDem policy for some time now, it makes all the sense in the world and now the Tories understand why. I can’t see it being a fault line at all, just a practical step to greater fiscal responsibility.
ChrisB
No I want both the institutions and the responsible persons in the instutions to pay.
To the extent that remuneration was based on an increase in the market value of their employing bank that did not exist (or that was artificial and later reversed), or that impoverished the clients or depositors of the bank, or the taxpayers of the country in which the bank was based, then I think it was the officers and employees that were the robbers and so taking back what they themselves took wrongly is not robbery, it is restitution.
It’ll be fantastic if it’s delivered but I’d be amazed if George Osborne takes on the City once they start lobbying him about “the importance of the financial services to the UK”, and all that trash. Yes, we are “lucky” to be sitting on the world’s largest time bomb, set to go off again in a few years if nothing is done. Nothing to be proud of really.