It’s all very well for Ed Balls to announce that the next Labour government will be ‘ruthless and disciplined’ over public spending and will carry through a zero-based spending review to justify every pound spent. Of course that’s right since nobody in their right mind can believe that the Tory spending cuts can be reversed […]
Posts Tagged ‘Vickers Commission’
There’s nothing to stop another financial crash
Sep 12th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.One of the great unspoken scandals of the post-2007 financial crash era is that no reform of the banking system has been put in place, though domestically the bank bail-out will cost UK taxpayers some £1.4 trillions by 2015 and globally the crash nearly collapsed the world economy. Despite those gigantic detriments, 5 years on […]
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Why are the Tories so coy about a judge-led inquiry?
Jul 6th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Parliament was at its worst yesterday. The mud wrestlers Osborne and Balls were so dementedly determined to lay toxic blame on each other for the shocking LIBOR scandal that the City escaped with hardly a bruise to its name. The difference between a judge-led inquiry and a special parliamentary select committee inquiry is not that […]
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Leveson-style inquiry into banks needed, not inter-MPs mud-slinging
Jul 4th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.They’re being forced to yield inch by inch. First, Barclays’ chairman Agius said he had no intention of resigning; 24 hours later he’d gone. Then the shameless and disgraced chief executive Diamond announced that he was the best person to oversee a change in culture at the bank, having told us a few months ago […]
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Banks need not just a few sackings, but wholesale restructuring
Jul 1st, 2012 by Michael Meacher.It’s not often one agrees with the Institute of Directors (IoD), but on this occasion they are right (as far as it goes) to say: “It is high time for a clear-out of the leaders who created this mess, and the should be replaced with new blood”. From the IoD’s point of view no doubt […]
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Osborne genuflects to banks, but still can’t turn up economy
Jun 17th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.It is astounding that some political leaders can be so wilfully blind. Osborne, faced with a collapsing economy and banks that are unwilling to lend because they have such lack of confidence in the economy that they don’t believe they’ll get their money back, has now in utter desperation bowed to banks’ demands to water […]
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Are banks the untouchables?
Nov 15th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.Latest figures show Big 5 banks are now lending only half to SMEs that they pledged under Operation Merlin to an enormous fanfare of self-congratulation a year ago. There have been no checks imposed on proprietary trading or on transactions in financial derivatives, both of which were main contributors to the financial crash of 2008-9. […]
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Ring-fencing isn’t enough, casino banking must be reined in
Sep 16th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.The real lesson of the alleged Kweky Adoboli fraud at UBS isn’t that the Vickers reform requiring ring-fencing between the retail and investment arms of banks should be implemented far quicker than 2019 – though that should certainly be the case. It’s rather that Vickers, after 18 months’ investigation, missed the point. The central problem […]
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How the super-rich rationalise their greed
Sep 13th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.The super-rich may not be much good at running the country, having engineered the worst financial crash for nearly a century, but they are certainly assiduous at justifying their own greed. Yesterday the Vickers Commission on Banking proposed a firewall between retail and casino investment banking designed to check profiteering from reckless speculation which is […]
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Sleepwalking into the next financial crisis
Apr 26th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.It is almost incredible that a nation like ours – which prides itself on being rational, committed to public debate, willing to learn from past mistakes – can be drifting towards the next financial crash with eyes wide shut. Several events in the last few weeks cannot be explained in any other way. The Vickers […]
