Through the prism of the BBC, the Banks are the bad guys, solely responsible for our financial woes. The role of Labour in bringing about the financial crisis is being sanitised and in fact the Labour Government is
If the banks obtain funds at low rates the whole economy benefits, businesses can borrow from the banks at lower rates and mortgages are lower….more jobs, more houses, higher GDP. The government’s stance now, not to guarantee the banks, is compounded by the government’s insistence on the banks having large capital reserves themselves…meaning less money available to lend to business…and what is lent is lent at higher cost. A report from UBS confirms this….and the damage being done to the economy by the government now refusing to guarantee the banking sector finances.
‘Banks being made riskier and Brits poorer, warns UBS’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9004507/Banks-being-made-riskier-and-Brits-poorer-warns-UBS.html
‘Comparing the BoE’s policy to that of the European Central Bank, UBS analysts warned the lack of an emergency scheme to support the UK banking system in the event of a new crisis already led to rapidly rising funding costs for lenders. Barclays and Lloyds Banking Group had to pay a very high price to access the debt markets. The impact of this on the economy has been profound. UBS says five-sixths of British private sector workers are employed by companies with no access to the bond market, while bank lending to the UK economy continues to decline. Noting recent Bank of England figures showing a decline in Britain’s foreign trade deficit, UBS said the authorities were ignoring “the lost GDP from inappropriately high cost of debt”. ‘
What’s missing is this.
Bank bailout – 70 bn. Most of the losses caused by Gordon Brown over paying for the shares of NR, Lloyds, … Second major loss caused by insuring banks after the fire.
Government undfunded debt (debts with no assets). 7,000 bn.
Government debts are 100 times larger than the bank bailout.
That also ignores the tax revenues from banks.
The real reason that politicians want to talk about banks so much, is that they don’t have to talk about their mess.
Also, take a sentence about bankers. Swap the word banker for black (or any other minority), and ask yourself, is it racist?
Agreed, the whole general term of “bankers” is being grossly misused over and over again, including by top BBC darlings Peston and “Two Eds”. There are all sorts of banks, and not all of them got bailed out and not all of them engaged in what Peston refers to as “casino banking”.
The other problem is that this same broad brush is used in the US, even though the banks have all paid back the TARP money (or the Government recouped its investment), with interest. Not what happened under Mr, Brown’s watch, I know. But the language being used by people whom the BBC expect you to trust implicitly is misleading and unhelpful.
It’s not just “the bankers” now though. It’s now been extended so that the other dirty word is “boardroom”.
Yes but when you get used to Stephanie Floundering Flanders you realise that the correct response is to think the reverse of what she says.
For example Greece will not get anywhere near default and how well the Greek bailout is doing (this was from last May and was breathtaking in its ignorance even for Flanders) are what she said, whereas poor Greece is in fact collapsing.
BBC can make ideological attacks on capitalism only because it is a telly-tax funded. The day it can sell its brand of Guardian polony in a free market I will eat my hat. I will even go buy a hat to eat.
The BBC hopes you don’t spend any time thinking about how much of a greedy Capitalist enterprise it is when nobody’s looking. There’s an astounding amount of profit-grabbing going on: BBC Worldwide, DVD sales, the website expansion to capture a share of the US market, the aggressive licensing of license fee-funded programming, the iPad app for subscribing to the BBC from outside the UK, etc.
The BBC softened its brief spell of China criticism before the last Olympics so they could keep on earning money from their broadcasting over there.
The BBC is as greedy and Capitalist as it gets behind the scenes. Every single on-air talent who plays this “profit is bad, greedy bankers” game will jump ship in a heartbeat if another network offers more money. And how many of them have their own company to save on income tax?
Hypocrites, the lot of them, from top to bottom.
What you never hear on the BBC (although I’ve written this often on B-BBC and other blogs) is that there was an alternative to rescuing the system by rescuing those banking institutions which were bust. Contrary to the BBC Narrative (and self-serving parasites everywhere) RBS, Lloyds and Northern Rock were not “too big to fail”.
Had they been allowed to go bust in the orderly fashion which company law in the UK provides, the major portion of the losses would have been restricted to the shareholders and substantial holders of bank paper where the losses properly belonged. The taxpayer was already (uncontroversially) guaranteeing £85,000 per retail depositor and the Bank of England was providing liquidity (not new funds) to enable the interbank market to function while the banks panicked.
Had, say, RBS been allowed to collapse, the shareholders/long term lenders to RBS would (and should) have taken Goodwin and his friends on the RBS board to court for their mismanagement of the bank. Every employee of RBS would have formally lost his/her job although many would have been re-employed by whoever bought the assets (particularly the domestic commercial operations) from the administrator. The losses of the banks’ crap lending policies (plus, in RBS’s case, crap takeover policies) would have fallen where they belonged. Furthermore, those losses would have been fully recognised sooner rather than later and the refinancing of the banking sector would have proceeded on the basis of certain knowledge rather than the present confusion.
This is not rocket science but, of course, the financial geniuses at the BBC commenting on bankers’ failings fail, in turn, to lay much of the blame where it also rightly belongs – on the Labour politicians and the regulators (none of whom, it seems, have suffered significantly or even at all). Worse, the culpability of the banks’ auditors has also been scandalously ignored. That RBS’s accounts were certified as “true and fair” at any point after 2006 is a travesty of corporate reporting but do we hear anything from the BBC? All we get is the recent publication of a PR report by Deloittes (one of the big bank auditors) grossly exaggerating (well let’s be frank here, lying about) the BBC’s “economic contribution” to national income.
Umbongo, didn’t have to let RBS and LLoyds go. LLoyds was shafted by Brown, RBS could have (possibly) survived had it watched Northern Rock go to the wall and pulled it’s socks up. As it was Brown saves NR, practically haading the others a guarantee, Fred the shred went on [one of] his disasterous buying sprees (ABN and more toxic debt) AFTER the NR debacle.
SO
There were at least two reasons Brown went down the route he did: first, since he hasn’t (and hadn’t) the first idea how the system works and being the good socialist that he is, the only feasible solution was to throw taxpayers’ money at the problem; and second the three “saved” banks employ lots of people in Labour-held constituencies.
Some man hating old hag was on Radio 5 with Dame Nikki this morning spinning the old lie that ‘evil men can’t be trusted and that only sweet women can save the world’
Can’t remember her name but her ‘claim to fame’ was some compare website.
Of course Dame Nikki didn’t stand up for men, after all the banks were really run badly for centuries were they not? oh hang on no, actually the banks were well run until Gordon Brown and his feminist harpies in Nu Liebore brought in their so called banking regulation.
And of course since the Blair babes (yuk) came to power we’ve had how many wars again?
Then did anyone else hear Dame Nikki snap at a woman who suggested we put a border in between Scotland and England? “ARE YOU A TORY?” snapped the queen of mince. Woman refused to answer telling Dame Nikki that it was not relevant. I think he then realised he’d done a ‘Guido’ on her and tried to cover up his outburst by claiming that the Tories would benefit from getting rid of Scotland, which may well be the case, but why did he sneer at her and call her a ‘Tory’ as if there were something wrong with that?
He never calls someone a ‘Labour voter’ if someone is spouting the usual lefty crap.
Campbell really does need to keep his left wing bias in order.
The BBC would never blame their labour party for anything would they. Now those dam Tories ……..
I’m fed up of hearing banker bashing every time I switch on the TV or radio.
We all know there’s issues with the banks, we don’t need constant coverage of it and fithy pieces of work-shy Commie scum camping outside St.Pauls to remind us.
Like it or not, we need the banks. A number of my customers are bankers, so they hand me their money personally. The public sector workers who recieve the bankers money via George Osborne seem to forget the source of much of their wages.