Nothing could better prove the rightness of splitting retail and investment banking than that one of the ridiculous, reprehensible rating agencies has downgraded several British banks at the mere suggestion of something that merely begins to approach that desperately necessary reform. Except, that is, if all of those agencies had done that to all of our banks. In a bad government, Vince Cable is one of the better ones.
Not so Liam Fox. As his downright corrupt dealings with Adam Werritty come to light, perhaps some will also be shone on Atlantic Bridge, Luke Coffey, and all that. Well beyond mere corruption there. So, probably not, then.
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But the downgrade is BECAUSE of the plan to ring-fence retail banking from risky investment banking. That's part of the plan, to makes sure that creditors take the risk of bank losses rather than that taxpayers do. Because the default risk is going to be carried by the private sector, the credit risk is greater. The financial markets worked this out hence the fact the fall in bank share prices today is quite subdued.
ReplyDeletePrecisely.
ReplyDeleteYes, that was your whole point. How did (s)he miss it?
ReplyDeleteReading in a hurry. We've all done it.
ReplyDeleteAs long as he does not keep coming back to try and cover his back while only digging his grave even deeper. You would have to go all tutorial on such freshman foolishness.
ReplyDeleteIt is the Friday of Freshers' Week now, so he should be past that. As you should be past mixing your metaphors. Tut, tut.
ReplyDeleteKnew as well as you did that you would annoy them with this.
ReplyDeleteThe idea that the ratings agencies' disapproval might be the best possible indication of rightness: although massively born out by the events of recent years, it still causes some people's heads to explode.
What next? That the answer to every problem is not necessarily more unemployment?
And taht is just your first paragraph. Imagine if they read as far as the second one.
Imagine, indeed.
ReplyDeleteThere was no Keynesian closed shop among economists in the 1970s, but those who screamed themselves to prominence on the claim that there was have now created a neoliberal closed shop with the catastrophic consequences that we now experience, and which we shall continue to experience while almost the only economics taught to undergraduates or published in peer-reviewed journals seriously maintains that the way out of recession is the State’s contrivance of even more unemployment and of even less spending power.
As we nurse our wounds, we will remember those who pulled the triggers. But we must not forget those who loaded the guns, or those who manufactured the bullets. Nor will we.
And you are right, of course. Perhaps I should have put the two paragraphs in the opposite order? Or would that have been just too, too much for them? One does not wish to be responsible for spontaneous combustion.
Yes, yes, yes. Academic economics has been a public nuisance for decades. But they are like the City spivs with their bonuses untouched even now that they have to be paid by the taxpayers that those spivs are not
ReplyDeleteEven though they are only sideline academics whose main incomes come from Wall Street or the City and from achingly right-wing think tanks funded by Wall Street and the City, nobody ever turns round to the Emperors of Economics and points out that they are stark naked rather than wearing their fine new clothes.
Nobody, that is, except you.
Don't forget the fat fees from the Loony Right media. We have all been Foxed.
ReplyDeleteAll except them, of course: the more rabidly "free"-marketerring that people are, the more you can guarantee that they themselves are as securely tenured as can be.
But there are quite a few of us, it's not just me. The mood is shifting. And when it does, by God it will. Talk about payback time.
Who would be your Chancellor of the Exchequer?
ReplyDeleteRobert Skidelsky is already in Parliament, but appointing David Blanchflower would be an excuse to give him a peerage. Not that an excuse is really necessary, he simply ought to have one. Either of those two would be superb in Number 11.
ReplyDeleteSkidelsky has a cracking article in this week's New Statesman. But moving onto your second paragraph, David. Agreeing with Maggie not so long ago is one thing. But agreeing with Kevan Jones? Come, come.
ReplyDeleteEven a stopped clock is right twice a day.
ReplyDeleteI assume that there is stuff on Anglo-American relations in Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, but is there any economics in it?
ReplyDeleteA bit, of course. But an entire chapter of what will probably be the one after that will consist of an extended review of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level, Robert Skidelsky's Keynes: The Return of the Master, and probably also Mehdi Hasan's The Debt Delusion.
ReplyDeleteYou know perfectly well that they don't count. Don't you? Do they?
ReplyDeleteWhere would it all end? Where might it all end? Where will it all end?
ReplyDeleteAnd then there is Distributism added to the mix...