Friday, October 17, 2008

Can a leopard change his feeling that spots are rather a credit?

Assuming that the Brown solution does save the financial system, it seems to have buried within it a typical complication that could cause all sorts of problems to the partially nationalised banks

There is a requirement for them to maintain lending to small businesses & home buyers at 2007 levels. Are not these levels at least in part a cause of the problem?

There do not seem to be, in the public domain, any details of what this requirement actually means in practice. It may just be a clever bit of politics, aimed at mollifying those who think they would rather see greedy stupid bankers go to the wall rather than bail them out with hard working tax payers money

Or it may be there to allow the government to impose a complicated tick box system of targets & performance indicators on the people trying to run the banks, & subject them to the kind of public vilification that the universities get for ‘failing’ to recruit students from ‘disadvantaged’ backgrounds in sufficient numbers