Is our economy bloated and blasé?
I’ve lost a billion last night. And so has every British tax payer or citizen. Just like that. The British government sold some of our shares in RBS, to test the water, far below the price they were purchased. We knew the temperature of the water was at £330, it needed to be £520 to let us float, more to makes us swim. Selling 5% of our shares, we have now lost a billion pounds. That’s a billion pounds we can’t spent on the NHS or Crossrail 2.
RBS is ours. What are with doing with it? We have started selling our shares before making an end to behaviours and bonuses that led to the crisis. Someone will have to lead the way and make banking clean. The superficial “words, words, words”-approach of banks like Barclays is just smoke and mirrors. Barclays have sent their alibi-CEO Anthony Jenkins rudely home only a few weeks ago as it was probably assessed that the storm in the public opinion had blown over and that the press was now looking away, at Greece and the euro.
With RBS, we now own a bank and have not taken any actions to change what makes banking so mysterious and therefore so attractive to psychopathic characters and the vulgarly rich. The doors and windows to the trading floors remain closed to our eyes, so we have to assume that what goes on in there is not much different than ten years ago.
Coincidentally, yesterday City Trader Tom Hayes was sent to jail for 14 years for rigging Libor. A harsh sentence, some say. They don’t see the vast amount of damage this man, and his colleagues and bosses, have caused to us all and our economy. The damage is so big, we can’t being to asses. His teary-eyed defence of being a ltittle bit autistic and everyone else did it too, didn’t wash. Unfortunately, the British legal system does not have the wattage, voltage and horsepower to chase after all those “others who did it too”. Many of them have disappeared, fled to Russia and the Middle East where the implement their experience in hedge funds. Much sleeker.
We are going to end up losing 14 billion. The government never thought asking RBS for commitment to compensate us, for instance by promising once it makes profit again, to build new schools and help build the so-called Northern powerhouse and its much needed rail connections.
Maybe we shouldn’t have bailed RBS out. Our economy might have collapsed; but then perhaps it deserved to collapse. We’ve managed to keep up the façade of a bloated representation of our economic reality. It might have been healthier in the long run to be more honest and show the banks some tough love.