| Topic: | Re:Re:Bashing the bankers? | |
| Posted by: | Richard Carter | |
| Date/Time: | 09/12/09 13:26:00 |
| I can see a big disagreement coming here.... What drives people's anger, I think, is that the people who got the economy into such a mess are not the ones who are going to suffer the consequences. OK, a few got the bullet but the rest seem to think they can carry on as before, and it's the disconnect between the redundancies of the many and the comfortable bonuses of the few that fuels public anger - and I don't think the non-publicly owned banks can claim, as John suggests, that they were self-sufficient, because the money shovelled into the system to prevent its compete collapse benefited them too. However, I'm not sure the populist response is necessarily the right one, understandable though it is. It can be argued that we shouldn't blame the bankers, after all they were just behaving like the greedy swine they are programmed to be. Who is really to blame is the idiotic politicians of both major parties who put a system in place that allowed the bankers to get away with (almost, though not literally) murder. Thatcher started things with the Big Bang in the City, and Labour have been as bad or worse - how vomit-inducing it is to see Brown's craven speeches to the City in which he praises them and boasts of reducing regulation even more than he'd done so already. Personally, I'd have nationalised the banks that needed to be bailed out and run them properly, investing in manufacturing not financial instruments, and separated the casino activities of the banks from their proper function. But unfortunately the government is too gutless to try anything like a proper reform and the Tories are too dogmatic to even think of it. |