Wednesday 14 December 2011

Mutual Benefits

The Co-op is the preferred buyer of a sizeable chunk of branches of Lloyds.

This is a welcome step towards the transformation of all retail banks into mutual building societies, ironclad as such by the Statute Law that already forbids building societies from engaging in investment banking, and would therefore automatically forbid all retail banks from so engaging if they had all been so transformed.

I do occasionally receive communications from people who cannot get their heads around that one. But it is the law; look it up if you don't believe me. And those people's complete inability to deal with the very concept of mutualism is an even stronger argument in its favour.

4 comments:

  1. Building societies don't do investment banking?

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  2. They are not allowed to. It's the law. Look it up if you don't believe me.

    That absolute separation - the work of those reviled creatures, the conservative Democrats - was also the law for all institutions (yes, all of them) in America throughout the decades when she first attained and then enjoyed global economic pre-eminence.

    The wretched Clinton repealed it, and the rest is history.

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  3. Not all EU competition law is bad, then?

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  4. It should never have taken that. We should have done it off our own bat.

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