Osborne is threatening to break up banks if they don't follow his rules on ring-fencing when he finally gets to introduce them in 2017, 2018, 2019 or 2020 (or whenever).
That's ridiculous. He claims all banking problems are Labour's fault. And it's taken him well over two years and any number of failed agreements with the banks to realise that whatever you do they abuse the rules.
The man is the true heir to the era of light touch regulation - except in his case he's just putting off regulation at all.
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Just how many more scandals do we need to demonstrate that the “too big to fail” Banks cannot be trusted?
Before we can get to grips with these Banks, which is like mud wrestling with four large eels, the shadow banking sector needs to be closed down and the only way that this can be achieved is to lift the veil on the secrecy jurisdictions.
If this is done then this will eliminate safe harbours for most if not all of the predatory style of capitalism that takes place. We can then help all companies adhere to Google’s former motto, “Don’t be evil”. After all evil likes nothing better than to operate in dark places away from the Public gaze!
If you free bankers and financiers they turn into crooks. Always. The rewards for crooked behaviour in this sector are just too great. Their activity is not illegal because you have just legalised it. Some of them will step over the line of the law but most won’t bother because they do not need to. But for me, if we decided tomorrow that theft was not a crime, I would still see thieves as crooks. There is a basic code of behaviour that is fundamental to the proper working of society and it is independent of the law to some extent.
Given deregulation, the banks and the financiers do what they are paid to do: they make profit. It does not matter what effect that has on the people in any given country, or indeed the world. This has always been true. That is not to say that these people are uniquely wicked: some of them probably do believe in such nonsense as “trickle down”. The effects are slow to manifest and it is alway possible to ascribe them to something else. We live short lives and we are not very good at cause and effect if the time lag is 20 years. So we look for causes in the recent past and miss the connections.
But the banks and the financial institutions have taken their opportunities well. They have persuaded very many people that their ideas are correct and, indeed, that challenge to those ideas is idiotic: for a long time it was not possible to even discuss the premises or the likely outcomes: it was obvious that the free market produced the best outcomes and this was effectively unchallengeable. Previously left wing parties accepted this conventional wisdom and are culpable too. Because they, of all people, should have known better. But they were dazzled by the rich and powerful: and some of them were bought.