Gordon Brown’s days as UK prime minister may be numbered but he will leave a legacy for the inheritor of 10 Downing Street. The bank shares he bought amid against much opposition will go some way to squaring the country’s finances in future years.
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Are these overgeared pyramids really the people to be buying Britain’s banks?
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Travellers expect their airlines to foot the bill for their enforced grounding. Airlines want governments to compensate them for their losses. Where are governments meant to find the money? Taxing travellers, presumably.
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In the United States the miscreant Northern Rock executives would gave received jail sentences longer than their life expectancy. In China they might have been executed. But even a £500,000 fine is exceptional in Britain, which is only just taking financial collapse seriously.
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The accounting watchdog has ordered Ernst & Young to explain its role in how Lehman Brothers hid $50bn of debts, but the regulator has a conflict. It is trying to increase the choice of audit firms so cannot do anything that reduces the current Big Four to just three.
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The time to set up a rescue fund is during the fat years, not the thin years when they are needed. That’s why it is sensible to think of such funds now: by the time the wrangling over their format is finalised we may again have the financial fat to fill them ready for the next thin period.
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President Obama’s call to make banks shed risky trading – effectively a new Glass-Steagall Act – is not off the UK agenda, despite being dismissed by government ministers. The architect of the plan, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, is coming to the House of Commons to outline his plan.
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The government’s losses from Black Wednesday are legion, but already quantitative easing has cost us more than that doomed attempt to save sterling in 1992. The QE losses have reached £8bn and the Bank of England hasn’t yet started to unwind the programme.
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If a 50 per cent tax on bonuses is not enough to stop bankers boosting their own pay, what does it take?
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What better monument to financial folly than the tower opened in Dubai at the start of 2010?
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