Current mood:

discontent

This has all happened before, and will happen again
Watching Sky News tonight, I'm struck with a strong sense of deja vu or, as Battlestar Galactica has it, "this has all happened before, and will happen again". It's about the banking crisis. Apparently the government are planning to use Northern Rock, which they own, as a "mortgage bank", NatWest/RBS as a "small business bank", and to set up an "investment bank" and a "savings bank" which they may give to the Post Office to run. Am I alone in remembering the old Post Office Savings Bank which became the Girobank in 1969, and was then sold off to Alliance & Leicester? One does have to wonder whether the Post Office actually has the expertise to run a bank, just as it's not possible to now resurrect British Rail as the experienced staff have now dispersed, retired, or died.

I get the impression that the clock is being turned back to the 50s and 60s when things were generally better run - financial institutions, at any rate. Hopefully the banking industry will be run responsibly until about the 2070s or 2080s, when people who remember the current debacle will have died off, just as the industry didn't go crazy until people who remembered the 30s had disappeared. I am, however, incensed at how tens of billions of public money is getting thrown to pull irresponsibly-placed banking chestnuts out of the fire, and the people who put the chestnuts there are retiring with massive pensions. If only governments had actually allowed some of these idiots to go to the wall, it would have been a salutary lesson, but of course too many innocents would have suffered with the guilty. A thoroughly unsatisfactory situation all round.