A PROPOSED shake-up of the UK banking system is to make it look as if someone is doing something about it.
The interim report from the Independent Commission on Banking sets out a series of recommendations based on their assumption that you and Vince Cable have no idea how any of this actually works.
Meanwhile the report has been given a cautious reception by the
British Bankers Association in what experts have described as an
insultingly transparent double bluff.
Nathan Muir, senior banking analyst at Madeley-Finnegan, said: “The central idea is that if a bank’s investment arm fails then ordinary people’s savings will be guaranteed and there will be no need for any more bail outs. But of course in 2008 deposits could have been guaranteed without protecting the investment arms anyway, which suggests they have come up with a solution for a problem which did not exist.
“At this stage you should feel free to start getting very suspicious.”
He added: “If an investment bank fails it starts a chain reaction of fucking things up quite tremendously, so the idea that everything will be fine because your little deposit is safe and snug in it’s fur-lined box is what we call ‘a lot of shit’.
“When that amount of money is lost it has to be replaced somehow, otherwise many, many other businesses will collapse. And the only guaranteed way of replacing it is to get it from the government and the only guaranteed way the government can get it is from… do you really not know?
“That’s right. And the reason you are the only guaranteed source of funding in the whole fucked-up system is because the government controls what we call ‘the police’.
“So the idea that these reforms will save taxpayers’ money in the event of a future banking crisis is like saying you will never get cancer because you always wear underpants.”
Muir said: “You see, the thing we’ve learned from all of this is that unrestrained free markets are not possible without big government.
“How fucked-up is that?”
