Why we must never trust the banks again!

The BBC2 program, 'Bankers' aired its 3rd edition last night.

It demonstrated most clearly and succinctly the levels of criminality that the British retail banking sector had sunk to during the era of the great PPI fraud, and it posed the question "...Can anyone ever trust the banks again..?"

It followed the timeline of corruption which gripped the banks after Big Bang, and demonstrated how the traditional role of relationship banking had been replaced by the urgent need to provide the highest possible returns to shareholders.

It demonstrated how in the aftermath of Big Bang, so many traditional savings institutions had changed their status to become banks in order to get in to the great big free-for-all promised by the changes in the City's structure. We should have read the writing on the wall, even then.

Bankers talked glibly in those days of wanting to get hold of the largest possible share of the client's wallet, as they changed their culture from being relationship managers to sales machines.

This ruthless pursuit of profit at all costs, the PPI fraud alone is estimated to have raised in excess of £25 billion in revenues, enabled the banks to exhibit their Janus face, looking in both directions at the same time, and demonstrating their wholly duplicitous nature.

Of all the issues raised by the programme, the most poignant was that of the way in which banks had ceased to be the providers of honest and careful advice to their customers, and had instead become competitors for the largest share of the client's wealth. One client wept while she described the way that her bank had defrauded her husband and herself by bombarding them with telephone calls aimed at getting them to sign up to a vastly onerous interest rate swap contract, after having borrowed money to help to develop a hotel business.

She talked hopelessly of how she had once trusted her bank to give her 'best advice', and demonstrated how, like so many other thousands of clients, her bank had become an aggressive competitor, seeing her as someone whom they could mislead and defraud, secure in the knowledge that they would be protected from any action for fraud!

One former bank employee, when talking about his part in the sale of interest-rate swap contracts, talked about how he and his colleagues would swap successful client sale stories, saying how they had 'raped' the client. The use of this aggressive, domineering, sexual imagery is regularly used by bankers in discussions with contemporaries to describe their conquests in the market.

What was instructive was how the programme demonstrated so well the way in which the financial sector managed to hoodwink and bamboozle the politicians, in this case, Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

Along the way, as Alastair Darling explained that at this time, the City was contributing about 10% of UK GDP, and when talking about the failure of the regulators to deal with the PPI scandal effectively, he admitted that in view of the amount of money being contributed by the City, there would have been no real political support for any regulator who had started to bring interventionist action against a regulated member, so nothing was done.

So besotted was Brown by the money being handed over by the City that he regularly accepted invitations to go down to the Square Mile and address the assembled usurers, "...hosing the oligarchs of financial services with sycophantic flattery..." as Andrew Rawnsley so succinctly observes.

When the bubble eventually burst, it was discovered that so misleading were the terms under which these contracts had been fraudulently created, that 85% of PPI applications were turned down, when hapless clients came to need their dubious benefits.

As usual, the FSA was very slow off the mark to deal with this. They had enjoyed responsibility for insurance products since 2005, but it took them another 6 years before they started to look at the PPI issue. Adair Turner was filmed making yet another of his alarming confessions, agreeing that the regulator was slow to act, but saying that of course, it wasn't the role of the FSA to deal with PPI matters.

He conveniently forgets that the FSA had a residual role to deal with City fraud, and that they could have stepped in and investigated the criminal fraud that was taking place under their noses, and had they done so, neither Gordon Brown nor Alastair Darling could have tried to prevent these criminal investigations.   

This was a powerful article and deserves re-viewing because what it demonstrates is the sheer wanton slippery slope, down which so many city practitioners slid into criminal activity.

It also demonstrates so well just how ill-prepared the regulators were to deal with the change in culture which was enveloping the banking business.

The way in which the City and its habitués were so willing to embrace the tactics of criminals, is worthy of consideration. What became clear is that the sales of these dubious products were being driven by an industry which sought short-term profits at all costs, and had come to look upon its natural clients as sacrificial victims.

Of course, the usual suspects were paraded to both admit that what had happened was wrong, and that everything in the garden was now rosy, and the banks were going to be your friend again in the future.

This is all very well, but it deserves to be remembered that these men, these 'reformed' characters have all benefited very nicely from the criminal years. They had still received their salaries, the funding for their pension funds, and more disgracefully, their vast bonuses, most of the money to pay for these excesses coming from the proceeds of crime, the wholesale defrauding of their client base. Believe me, they wouldn't be paying back this money at the rate they are being required to, if they felt they had any chance of arguing that is was straight money!

So, these old wolves in their new sheep's clothes, want us to believe that it is now safe to go back into the water again.

Well, Alastair Darling put it quite succinctly at the end of the programme. To paraphrase him he said, that "...in time, a new product will become available and people will be required to sell it, and that will lead to yet another scandal for which the regulator is not equipped to deal..!"

I go back to what I have been saying before.

The City of London and its banking component is an entity to itself. These men belong to a powerful private club that exists to serve the interests of its shareholders, not the British people at large.

At the moment they are smarting because the spotlight of publicity has been shone on their activities, and the resultant bad publicity has hurt them. But not enough to make any great difference. They will soft pedal for a while, but like the scorpion, they cannot help themselves, it's in their nature to sting, and their ugly face will be revealed again ere too long when it comes time to top up the coffers, or their shareholders demand greater value from their investments!

Earlier, I mentioned how many institutions changed their status in order to become banks, in the aftermath of Big Bang.

One such was The Abbey National Building Society which back in 1989, persuaded its mutual members to vote in favour of conversion into a bank. I wrote an article about the risks that Abbey clients would face when this happened, and drew parallels between this process and the Savings and Loans scandals in the USA. My article, needless to say, pissed off quite a few people down at the Abbey conversion centre! 

Imagine my surprise when, after the conversion had successfully been negotiated, the Building Societies Commission published its findings on the way in which the conversion had been achieved and the way in which its clients had been influenced by the glossy PR work done on behalf of the new bank!

Phrases such as "...A biased view of the conversion from mutual society to a public limited company..." or a "...significant deficiency in information..." gave the reader a clue! Other paragraphs read; "...Misleading, biased, inconsistent, partial and facile..."

It got worse. The report continued to state that the Abbey National had made "...Misstatements which repeatedly failed to give its saving and borrowing members a fair and balanced assessment of the consequences of the proposals..."  The Transfer document was said to "...fall far short of the balanced assessment of the consequences of conversion which members of a society can reasonably expect from a board..."

Of course, nothing was done, and the Abbey National went on to become, well it has now been taken over by Santander.

This report should have struck a huge chord in the mind of the regulators at the SIB, as the lead regulator was then, but as with its successor, the FSA, they did nothing about what was clearly a shoddy and botched-up conversion, because it was all happening at the time that the whole financial sector was reinventing itself.

Then, as now, there was going to be no political support for any regulator who got in the way of that process, and the same will be true again, in the future!

Why organised criminal money has become the banks' best friend!

At a time of significant financial crisis, banks are always looking for ways to maintain their profit margins and encourage inward deposit-taking.

Despite stringent anti-money laundering laws, in the UK, but also elsewhere in Europe and the USA, banks still manage to attract and process billions of dollars worth of criminal money in the UK, without being subjected to any meaningful intervention from the regulatory agencies.

I can only conclude from this that the UK Government is content to allow banks in the UK to use criminal money as a means of bolstering their capital adequacy requirements, but without asking any awkward questions.

I know this is a scandalous thing to assert, but it is the only conclusion that I can genuinely reach, based on the evidence before me.

We have had anti-money laundering legislation since 1994 in the UK. The penalties for failing to comply with the requisite proscriptions are significant and severe, yet not one senior banker has had cause to regret not providing better compliance with the law since that time. Years ago, a main board Barclays Bank director told me that he and his class would never be prosecuted for money laundering because they were a 'protected species'. Today, despite significant evidence of wholesale money laundering, he has been proven right because  not one banker has been sent to prison for these criminal activities.

I have finally but reluctantly come to the realisation that the banks have become far more powerful than the Government, indeed, one could argue that they are the de facto government, but are merely content to allow the puppet politicians to run things, as long as they carry forward policies which will permit the banks to continue their business, regardless of its obvious blatant criminality.

How else can one explain the many financial scandals, the appalling frauds, the criminal market manipulation, the wholesale tax evasion and other less-enlightening elements of banking behaviour which have proliferated in recent times, but without any of their senior members being required to spend time as a guest of her Majesty.

That they have been breaking the law is not in doubt!

When a bank like HSBC can openly and lewdly run a Mexican drug cartel laundering operation with the kind of impunity that they indulged in, one can only assume that they did so as part of a confirmed business plan which had been nodded through.

Global banks simply don't operate at this level of granularity without someone in the highest level of Government, whether it be in the Security Services or the Secret Intelligence Services knowing about it and providing some form of imprimatur for the activities. I can easily imagine some spook sidling up alongside and offering a green light in return for a sight of the client base!

I think this is one of the most important factors, these institutions are no longer national institutions, Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC, RBS, whatever, these are not British banks any longer, they are global banks and they play in the global market. They play the game of regulatory arbitrage, seeking the most benign jurisdiction from which to operate (happily for them still the UK), while playing fiscal arbitrage with their profits, seeking the most beneficial tax regime in which to post their earnings.

This feature alone presents huge problems to national regulators and tax gatherers, while opening up significant gateways for more profitable business for the banks.

Once you move your place of business into the realm of cyberspace, you no longer need to fear the regulators in your original home town, because, frankly, they cannot touch you!

As long ago as 2001, I wrote a book in which I sought to argue that the global laws on money laundering were really intended to deal with the attempts by citizens and corporations to hide their revenues and personal wealth from the grasping hands of rapacious Chancellors. The book was never published because the sponsor described it as being too fanciful, and a theoretical rant! Let me quote to you from the introduction and you decide who was right! 

Talking about what I believed was the inevitable business move into cyberspace and the offshore sector I said:

"...This is the region where the world’s wealth will migrate and continue to migrate in the foreseeable future. This is where the new economy of the information age will be most understood, and this is where the technology and the means to drive the new thinking behind the new ways of doing business will be developed. The old wealthy from the former post-industrial economies who choose to hide their money in these emerging wealth-generating democracies will find themselves increasingly under threat from their country of origin. They in turn will seek to do everything in their power to prevent this money from escaping to these safe havens, and they will use all the powers at their disposal.

This is why governments in the old post-industrial democracies are busily passing more and more laws and regulations dealing with the flows of money around the world. This is why they are seeking to introduce even more legislation dealing with charities and other not-for-profit organisations, and why they are seeking to engage ever wider groups of players within the regulatory net. They need the information of where the money is going and where it is being held and who is holding it. This is the area which I predict, will become the leading area of conflict for governments and its citizens in the future as more and more citizens will retreat from their continued willingness to have their own assets confiscated by government, to support a growing number of otherwise unfunded citizens. This is where the battle lines for control of the remaining wealth possessed by a shrinking number of citizens will be drawn, and where the myriad laws and regulations regarding money laundering and criminal confiscation will come into their own..."

This is the reason why HMRC are doing sweetheart deals with the big global companies; this is why they don't chase Starbucks and Amazon for more taxes, they may not pay much Corporation tax but they provide jobs; this is why Boris Johnson and the Tory Government welcome every Russian Godfather, Crook, and Oligarch, they have huge amounts of money to hide and launder, and far better that British banks get the business; and this is why the FSA or the SFO never went after any of the major banks for their criminal activities, because our political masters are too afraid that if they press too hard, these companies will simply relocate in cyberspace, and go elsewhere, with a concomitant loss of employment opportunities!

The UK is literally being forced to dance to the tune of global organised crime, and the Government is too scared to do anything about it, for fear that there simply will not  be sufficient tribute paid by the crooks, thieves, wiseguys and banksters, to keep them in power! The UN Office of Drugs and Crime has reported that organised crime has now grown to the level of a transnational superpower, but that nation states have been guilty of a level of 'benign neglect' in their dealings with it, because it contributes too much to their balance sheets.

Oh, and Cameron and Osborne will continue to pay lip service to the concept of requiring companies to pay the taxes that are owed, but sending begging letters to the British protectorates and overseas territories, asking them to share information, isn't going to cut the mustard. The UK has jurisdiction over 10 tax haven countries, such as the Cayman Islands, which make up a fifth of world’s tax havens. Those entities will look to see where their best interests lie, and it ain't going to be sharing client information with the old mother country too fast!

Of course, most of the Tory party hopes they won't be too anxious to contribute that information at all, because they are the party of the City and the banksters and they have too many vested interests to be too vociferous in enforcing that pipe-dream, hence one of their reasons for hating the EU so much!

In any event, the City of London is far too busy getting very rich indeed from moving the dirty money generated by so many organised criminal entities around the world. The real world economy is now a largely criminal economy, and it operates offshore and in cyberspace for the most part, and the British national interest demands that the UK continue to provide the lion's share of professional services to the new money!

In Europe, particularly along the Southern Spanish shoreline, the property boom may have stalled, but that hasn't altered the vast number of Russian and former Eastern European gangsters who wallow there, from continuing to generate vast sums of criminal proceeds from drug trafficking, arms smuggling, the sex trade, as well as operating some of the most efficient money laundering entry points in the EU region.

Gibraltar, with its British status and British banks is only a few kilometres away and is a very convenient gateway to the global banking system. The money has to be smuggled across the border, but the Spanish authorities are notoriously corrupt and routinely corrupted, and very little gets interdicted. In Southern Europe, the official culture does not share the same degree of anxiety about corruption entertained by the Anglo Saxon community, and anyway, Spain is suffering from a dire austerity regime. Who can blame an official for looking the other way when the backhand payoffs can easily exceed his monthly take home pay!

Elsewhere, dirty money, much of it generated from the Afghan drug trade, flows out of Pakistan using the country's notoriously flaky lack of money laundering controls, much of it to be reinvested in the UK in huge swathes of property purchase in the West Midlands and the North West. Bounced through British banks in Dubai, the money quickly finds its way into the global economy before resurfacing in Birmingham or Manchester. I once sat next to a British/Pakistani businessman, while flying from Peshawar to Karachi, who explained the entire process to me, and particularly how many Pakistani travel agencies were engaged in the process. He told me that the British authorities did nothing to enquire where the huge sums of money being washed through the travel agencies came from or who was its beneficial owner. 

In the upper-world economy, particularly in Europe, we are suffering from a recession which is lowly strangling us to death, because the Government has run out of money. Wages have stalled, and are in decline, unemployment is a very real issue, standards of living are falling, and the policies of austerity mean there is not enough money available to maintain those services we have for so long learned to live with as an important integral part of our lives, health, education, policing, transport, it is all in decline. Growth has stalled, savings have failed, and the ordinary tax payer is being bled white.

Meanwhile in the underworld economy, business has never been better, there is so much dirty and criminal money being moved around the system and requiring specialist professional services, that the City of London and its occupants are never idle. The big corporates pay as little tax as they can, and put the rest into further offshore accounts. The Stock market index is booming, the index is standing at its highest level since the 1990's, and yet there is no obvious evidence to explain why? 

The financtial editor of the Financial Times believes that Quantitative Easing has had an influence, but I believe the answer is much more mundane. The wiseguys who are awash with cash are playing the stock markets because it is one of the easiest ways to launder dirty money and explain sudden accruals of wealth, and in a bull market, if you have got a lot of cash to play with, and you don't mind taking a risk, it is like taking candy from a baby!

Suddenly, brokers are cracking open the Champagne again, and there is a general feel of 'happy days are here again' in the air. I walked past a broker's wine bar in the City yesterday, and it was packed with the suits pouring bubbly down!

Who knows where this investment money is coming from? Who gives a flying fuck, just let it keep on flowing, do the trade, take the commission, don't ask, don't tell!

So, this is my take on the reasons why the Government has done and is doing nothing about money laundering through the banking system. They are truly scared that if they start getting tough on the banks, then the banksters will move out of London and relocate with a significant loss of jobs and revenue.

I believe we are now operating as a country entirely at the whim of the City of London who have now taken over the control of the agenda. When you have the means of controlling the money supply and holding the economy to ransom, then you are the Government, no matter what the politicians may say, and they will dance to your tune, on the basis of 'he who pays the piper'!

I predict we will see continued growth in the offshore sector, increasing evidence of wholesale tax evoision by increasing numbers of corporate entities and the growth of criminal money being used to fund the balance sheets of our banks. The offshore sector is now the real economy, the collateral is provided by organised crime, and Governments will have to put up with it if they want to stay in power.

I am not expecting to see any prosecutions of any ,major bank executives in the near future!

"Why We Must Never Stop Bashing the Bankers" - Responding to Mervyn King's special pleading!

Speaking to the Huffington Post, and re-printed in the Daily Telegraph today, Sir Mervyn King makes a special plea for the demonising of bankers to stop.

"....Sir Mervyn King has called for an end to the demonisation of bankers over the financial crash, insisting the problem was with the system rather than individuals.

The outgoing governor of the Bank of England said there was a failure to adequately regulate the financial sector and society had given "too much status" to those in the City..."

In a way, these parting words are an attempt by him to defuse the suggestion that he has been altogether too critical of the banks.

Well, I'm sorry, but like another great tart, Mandy Rice-Davies once said; "...He would say that, wouldn't he..!"

I think it is wholly farcical that the outgoing Governor of the Bank of England, the regulatory figurehead, on whose watch this era of organised financial crime has taken place and been allowed to go unpunished, should now start pontificating about the need to cut the criminals some slack, and blaming the regulatory process. He says;

"...I would say to people, though, don't demonise individuals here. This wasn't a problem of individuals, this was a problem of a failure of a system..."

"...We collectively allowed the banking system to become too big, we gave it far too much status and standing in society and we didn't regulate it adequately by ensuring that they had enough capital. We have to put that right..."

Sorry, who's this 'we' you keep banging on about, Merve, it surely wasn't the regular readers of this blog, or those who got screwed in the PPI scandals! I'll bet it wasn't the men and women who got defrauded by HBOS or the clients who were sold dodgy interest rate swaps. And it certainly wasn't me, so who was it?

Why is it that Mandarins of Sir Mervyn's kidney, always seek to spread the blame among as many people as possible and then accuse the process, but never the individual? 

It's called 'Techniques of Neutralisation' in financial criminology, and it is a classic way of trying to shift the blame away from those people who really are responsible.

It's because they know, only too uncomfortably, that when you start to focus on individuals, they themselves can quickly be brought under the spotlight. Far easier to blame the process and claim that some unforeseen error (like absence of capital) caused the problem.

Yes, it's true, the regulatory process fucked up big time! They engaged in a process of 'light touch' regulation, because wee 'Goordy Broon' got bamboozled by the clever chaps in the City, believing that they were really bringing him shed-loads of money, so he gave them 'light touch' regulation, which in practice meant no regulation at all. Labour took the constraints off the banks, and then expressed surprise when the entire edifice ran out of control down the hill and crashed into the wall!

The whole crisis can be explained very simply. Banks in America, who have branches and entities in the UK as well, were lending money to people to invest in property, in a seemingly unceasing upward spiral of prices. The practice quickly spread to banks in the UK as well.

This wasn't real money that was being lent out, and the lending banks didn't have to worry about the likelihood of its being repaid because they were packaging up the debts as fast as they could and selling them on to someone else as securitised investments. Those speculators, in turn, repackaged these debts and sold them on, and so on and so on!

They created a vast mountain of debt, all leveraged on two premises. One was that house values would continue to rise, and the second was that all those people who had borrowed so heavily to mortgage themselves up to the back teeth, would not default on their obligations!

The irony was that the one premise depended upon the second , and once defaults in payment started as people lost jobs or became redundant, so the hiccup in the debt market led to a loss of confidence in the house market, which led to a slide in house prices. And as every price tick downwards was observed in the value of house prices, it amplified the leveraged debts incurred exponentially.

Eventually the debts became so huge that they could not be managed and despite the existence of credit default swaps and other Machiavellian derivative contracts which had been written to give the impression of a fully hedged portfolio of debt exposure, banks were staring real defaults in the face.

Dean Baker in an article of Feb 11, 2010 in The American Prospect entitled "...Mervyn King Is Not Only an Incompetent Central Banker, He Also is a Bad Teacher..."

identified the failure by Alan Greenspan in the US and Mervyn King in the UK to tackle the bubbles in their respective countries' housing markets, a failure which resulted in catastrophic "fallout" when the bubbles burst, resulting in the worst recessions in both countries since the Great Depression. 

Rather than risk a melt-down in  the banking market and possibly the undermining of the whole economic complex on which the City of London depends, and on which the UK Government depends even more. the decision was taken to use tax-payers' money to prop up the banks which had been brought low because of a combination of pure greed, avarice, hubris and downright criminality.

It wasn't you or me who did this. We were not the ones who made these decisions. We were not responsible for allowing the banks to give out money like a man with no arms, to people whose chances of repaying the debts were so illusory that phrases like snowballs and hell spring to mind!

These decisions were made by men and women who were being paid incrementally-rising levels of bonus for every new crock of shit they sold. Every time some idiot took out yet another loan, the bankers were getting rewarded. They didn't need to worry about the creditworthiness of their borrowers because the debts were off their balance sheet as soon as they were created, and packaged up and sold on. And of course, they were selling a vast number of worthless and fraudulent PPI contracts as well, to the punters, so the profits just rolled in.

But it was people doing this, making these decisions, providing these loans, the bankers, people who should have known better!

It was people who were defrauding their clients on the PPI contracts, it was people setting up the banking arm of HSBC in Mexico to move the drug money for the Mexican cartels.

It was people who were manipulating the LIBOR market and ringing up their mates and offering bribes to bring the price down to or keep it up at wholly artificial levels.

All these elements were human interventions, and they were carried out by people who we must assume had the capacity to think about their actions, and make moral judgements about what they were doing!

And it was people who were sitting in control of the regulatory mechanisms, Mervyn King at the Bank of England;  Adair Turner at the FSA, and what were they doing?

The answer, sadly, is very little! Were they all waiting for each other to act, hoping that someone else would take the responsibility to grasp the nettle!

It is simply not good enough for the outgoing Governor of the Bank of England to say now, "...oh let's not demonise individuals here, this was about a failure of regulation..."

Well yes, to an extent, he's right, it was about a failure of regulation, but it was more than that, it was about a failure of regulators to identify the guilty individuals, and to take them on, whatever the cost.

This is the moral dilemma you accept when you become responsible for ensuring that any sector of society obeys the rules you are there to enforce, whether you are a cop on the beat or a regulator in a suit, you have a duty to perform, and the way in which you perform that duty will say everything about you!

It also says as much about the people who appointed you, whether they got the right person for the job, and if not, why not?

You know, it was perfectly well within the ambit of Sir Mervyn's role as Governor of the Bank of England, when things were going really badly, to arrange a meeting with the boss of the FSA, the Home Office, The Commissioner of the City of London Police, H.M.Treasury, and to have raised his concerns at the way the City was behaving. He could have pointed out the levels of organised criminality which were taking place, and asked the FSA what they were doing about it, and if the answer, as it would have been was 'very little', he could have perhaps invited the Police Commissioner to provide some input to the discussion.

He could have taken soundings with the Home Office, he could have discussed it with the Treasury, he could have done something to emphasise his concern and to demonstrate that he was not merely complacent!

He may have done this for all I know, although if he did, I am surprised we have not heard of something like that going on.

You see, this is the perennial response to allegations of major City criminality. Let us rather blame the process and claim it is being reformed, but leave the individuals alone. The only problem with this formula is that no matter how many times you reform the process, the criminals are still there, and with the same propensities to commit crimes!

No, we have to continue to demonise the individuals, and we have to require that they are held responsible for their own actions.

This is the only way that we will ensure that others do not become so willing to step forward and behave in a similar way in future.

The only way in which the City is going to be freed from this miasma of organised criminal conduct is for a full and permanent cleansing of the Augean stable, with a root and branch cleansing of the crooks and the wide-boys who run its operations. There has to be a cauterisation of those wounds which have cost the City so dear, and there has to be a complete revitalisation of policies of ethical integrity and complete financial transparency.

That is if the City really wants to regain any of its tattered reputation for sound practice! Mervyn King says it can be done.

"...The reforms being made to the way the City was regulated would result in a “revolution in the way in which banking is handled and we will be able to be proud again of British banking”. 

“In a couple of years’ time we could, if we carry on the right path, get to a point where we would be best practice in the regulation and structure of our banking system,” he said. “Then instead of people trying to mock British banking, as they did in 2007/8 when things went wrong, they will actually look and say, well actually they did learn the lessons....” 

That's what he says in public and to the Daily Telegraph, but he is kidding himself. 

He has to say these things, he cannot go into retirement in the full and certain knowledge that as Governor of the Bank of England he has presided over the greatest period of banking scandals since the South Sea Bubble.

He has often been accused of being quite acerbic towards the banking sector. Some of Britain's top banks were warning in March 2012 that they will move abroad unless a less “hostile” successor to Sir Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, is appointed when his term ends. It is likely that these, his latest words about the banking sector, are an attempt to defuse his criticisms of the banks in the past.

I fear it is already too little and too late! The genie is out of that bottle, and now the ordinary members of the public know only too well the kind of men who have brought this country to its knees, financially, and have left the ordinary tax payer with a legacy of debt which will take years to expunge.

So, I say there must be no soft-peddling on these dishonest bankers, and we must continue to keep bashing them at every possible opportunity, naming and shaming them if possible, because apart from locking them up, it will be the only other process that might, just might, keep them on the straight and narrow!