Blame the banks (From Cotswold Journal)

Blame the banks

9:00am Tuesday 26th June 2012 in Letters

MR Wathen’s anti-Labour tirade (June 7), and Mr Luff’s party politicking (May 17) avoided mentioning banks.

Lynn Davies (May 24) was right. Banks were the real culprits. Far from being trustworthy, they weren’t.

Over-levered, hedge fund mastodons, too big to fail, had to be bailed out.

Their risk is now the people’s risk.

It was Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Big Bang’ of 1986 that introduced deregulation here, with free market doctrines of unfettered competition in all aspects of our lives: laissez faire (‘let it be’) economics runs with the grain of Tory philosophy, so they shouldn’t try to play the innocent now. They like less, not more, regulation.

No lessons were learned by new generations from the bitter consequences of bank greed and dishonesty, which led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. America’s ‘financial firewalling’ Glass- Steagall Act (1933), enacted to avoid a repetition, was dismantled.

In contrast to our folly, Canada never abolished its strict banking regulations, so its banks sailed through the banking crisis unharmed, without bleeding any money from its taxpayers. Regulatory discipline, cultural mindset, ingrained conservatism, and selfrestraint saved them.

C MERRIMAN, Evesham