Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Northern Wreck Latest

As Guido points out, the Northern Wreck, if you will, shambles now offers the amusing prospect of a bank nationalised by a Labour goverment having to repossess the homes of the people. It will be a fitting, richly symbolic climax to the hard right, militaristic, viciously authoritarian, bureaucratic, wealth-worshipping years of New Labour. Northern Wreck is a story I have only half-followed. I am widely known as a bleak, pessimistic, gloomy, sour, misanthropic, bitter, twisted type, but, in this case, I had idly assumed that it would all go away quite soon and the City boys could go back to their screens, once more deluding themselves into thinking they had lives worth living. But, judging by Dispatches last night, it's only just begun with all the banks about to announce entertainingly enormous losses. The symmetry of error in this case is funny but troubling. The tripartite regulatory system, introduced by Brown, failed miserably - very miserably as NR's business plan was so transparently stupid. The media failed to point this out. And then, of course, the banks lent our money to the worst credit risks they could find in America, covering the whole thing with dodgy 'products'. We have a tripartite incompetence system. This is troubling because the whole mess is likely to end with everybody just shrugging their shoulders because everybody is to blame, which is the same as saying nobody is. Personally, much as I'd like to say Brown is the primary culprit, I think we should focus on the bankers. They should be scorned and humiliated for what seems to have been the most abject management failure of recent times.

7 comments:

  1. Absolutely spot on Bryan. I posted a couple of days on the whole business of where it's all going so sadly wrong. I finished with....

    The secret of life might just be our ability to achieve our expectations. Today our expectations are continually being pushed just beyond our reach.

    For the rest....

    http://tinyurl.com/3y9s6c

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  2. Do please have a look at Polly on the subject of Northern Rock in the Guardian's Comment is Free. What a joy. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/19/labour.economy

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  3. Good grief - classic stuff that, Sophie.

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  4. With the high st. banks going international, why on earth is a National Bank giving a protective guarantee. It is lucky that NR is as small as it is. And why on earth did the other banks not rally to protect the NR.

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  5. I think we should ask ourselves what would have happened if this had been Southern Rock, a bank at the far end of the country from the Labour Heartlands...

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  6. Too right. Another angle on banks is the way they treat their high street customers and the BBC Watchdog show recently did a very large survey on this. Abbey National were the worse with Halifax second, I personally have experience with the incompetence and callous bullying of The Halifax.

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  7. I was about to write that how the government justifies paying anything at all to the shareholders is beyond me. But it's not. Doesn't make it right, though.

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