Kenny McBride

Barclays Bank PLC isn't a private business - it is a public limited company.

It's not run for the good of the public in general is what I mean. It's run for the benefit of it's owners and shareholders. It is not a public service, and people need to get over the idea that banks are public services.

 

A functioning banking system is a more or less essential part of a capitalist economy. They may not be a "public service" in the way that, for example, the NHS is. It doesn't change the fact that they have a social responsibility that goes above and beyond the profit motive.

Have the banks ever agreed to this, or is it just something that's been taken for granted?

Are you mental? Do you understand what society is?

Barclays Bank PLC isn't a private business - it is a public limited company.

It's not run for the good of the public in general is what I mean. It's run for the benefit of it's owners and shareholders. It is not a public service, and people need to get over the idea that banks are public services.

A functioning banking system is a more or less essential part of a capitalist economy. They may not be a "public service" in the way that, for example, the NHS is. It doesn't change the fact that they have a social responsibility that goes above and beyond the profit motive.

This, pretty much. It amazes me that none of the major banks seem to have thought about the PR, though. Imagine what it would do for their public image if one of the banks said "OK, no bonuses over x amount this year. Instead, we're going to make all that money available as zero-interest loans to the best 100/1000/whatever new business plans we receive over the next few months."

Banks are businesses. Do you not think they give loans to the best new business plans they recieve anyway?

Well, in case you haven't noticed, business lending has seized up dramatically over the last couple of years due to everyone in the industry becoming pathologically risk-averse. Starting a business in a recession automatically makes you higher risk. Banks are currently extremely risk-averse and most have reduced lending capital available due to increased liquidity requirements. It's very, very difficult even for existing businesses with decent credit histories to get loans right now. Start-ups (which, we are told, are going to save our economy) are in an even more difficult position, as the risk is that much harder to assess for an unproven commodity.

It probably wouldn't be so good when all their executives quit en masse and left them in a total mess though.

Yeah, that's the bit that sucks the most. I don't know - maybe they could defer all those bonuses over the next couple of years or take them as share options not redeemable for another year or two. I think it'd be a good idea one way or another to encourage the investment arms of these banks to take a longer-term view than just "how much profit can we make today?"

And Bashar is right in a way. Every bank is benefitting in some way from the last government's largesse. The structures put in place to protect against "toxic debt" and all that jazz helped everyone clear a lot of skeletons from their closets with very little downside.

It's a Lib Dem idea, Kenny, incidentally.

Makes no odds, really. Liberal economic policy is basically Tory economic policy with a big smiley face painted on it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12663730

 

I know lots of people are against banking bonuses but banks like Barclays and HSBC surely there is no recourse considering the money is entirely their own to do with as the please, they're turning a profit, I don't see the problem. I see a problem with RBS giving bonuses as that is legitimately government bail out money.

 

I'm aware there's an anti-success strain that permeates a lot of members here but surely earned money is yours to do with as you please. Nobody forces you to use Barclays and HSBC after all.

 

Straw man. Nobody's "anti-success", that's just knee-jerk rhetoric that comes out whenever someone suggests that businesses should face up their responsibilities to society (and anyone who says businesses are outside society is talking shit).

 

I haven't seen anyone on here advocate against bonuses for Barclays or HSBC executives, and I don't imagine for one minute anyone on here would, largely because most people who've posted on here so far (barring the most blatant exception) haven't displayed a lack of critical understanding worthy of Jade Goody. I certainly don't advocate it, and in fact I'd say if anything, the HSBC and Barclays lot probably deserve theirs just for keeping their banks largely untouched by the recent collapse.

This, pretty much. It amazes me that none of the major banks seem to have thought about the PR, though. Imagine what it would do for their public image if one of the banks said "OK, no bonuses over x amount this year. Instead, we're going to make all that money available as zero-interest loans to the best 100/1000/whatever new business plans we receive over the next few months."

By the way, did anybody hear the suggestion that instead of just selling all our RBS shares back into the market, the government is now considering giving every adult in the country about 1000 quids' worth of shares to do with as they please? I actually rather like the idea.

 

It's certainly a vote winner, but that much spare money, with the deficit and cuts and everything else. The money's needed more elsewhere.

A vote winner at this stage of the game is needless and probably pointless. If they save it until just before the next election, it might do them some good. As a general point of Tory principle though, I think it's amongst their best. A business was effectively nationalised. When it comes to re-privatising it, isn't it better that EVERYONE gets the benefit rather than the minority who have the funds and the access to already be able to play the stock market? The bailed-out banks will almost certainly all recover and become successful again. If we all get a share, we can then all get the nice dividends and/or sell the shares on for the cash reward and/or hang on to them and all get a vote at their AGMs to try and make them more accountable and responsible.

By the way, did anybody hear the suggestion that instead of just selling all our RBS shares back into the market, the government is now considering giving every adult in the country about 1000 quids' worth of shares to do with as they please? I actually rather like the idea.

The problem was a lack of good regulation. In the old days, a bank like Northern Rock would have been picked up on sooner. Its directors would have been called in to the Bank of England and been told that they were selling up to a bank that was more viable. Panic would be avoided and people's investments would be protected. The idea that Northern Rock would have gone to the wall and everything would have been lost is nonsense. The government already had an insurance scheme to cover fairly large deposits and the mortgage book would have been sold off if NR had been allowed to collapse. The problem was that because the news got out that things were shaky and the regulators weren't able to step in and do something about it to properly avert a panic and all the ensuing chaos that would cause, we ended up with a situation where the government had to step in and guarantee far more than it should ever have needed to. The loss of confidence in the system as a result of that and the similar problems in the States and elsewhere are what triggered the seizing up of the whole system, leaving us where we are today.

I don't actually think John does support Labour, but he can answer that himself.

I think the Labour government made a mistake in the way it altered financial regulation such that a bank bailout should never have been necessary. However, the Tories actively supported the same policy and have since moved to reduce the tax "burden" on those same banks still further.

Oh, and I do some work with homeless people. I can tell you thay cuts since the election have made a difference. I agree that pushing home ownership above all else was a bad idea, but it was a policy first formulated by Thatcher. It was only under Labour that money from council house sales was allowed to be re-invested in new housing.

And you assume Al Jazeera is completely unbiased in its coverage of Palestine?

Yep, the Holocaust was just a dry run.

A girl I went to uni with ended up working for Al Jazeera. That's how I knew it wasn't about Islamic extremism. If it was, they'd have stoned her, not given her a job.

Same girl found Euan Blair pished, face down in Leicester Square, for anyon who remembers that story.

Happ, here's the problem. I actually think that a number of the issues you raise are worthy of further exploration. But you're talking utter shit. You're making stuff up all over the place. Lister is not some liberal tyrant trying to force you into the hegemony. He's just someone who knows how to read and gets annoyed by people who refuse to even try. Even the other "right-wingers" in this thread have vanished, because they realise you're dragging them down.

Here's an idea. Make a substantive point. Just one to start with. Back it up with actual evidence. Explain your interpretation of the evidence and why you think it supports your viewpoint. From there, we'll see if we have a throng of liberal hacks, unable to accept any other opinion, or whether we have some people with strong views who like to argue their case strongly who just happen to have better evidence for almost everything they say than you have for almost everything you say.

The BBC has employment quotas to fulfill for just about every demographic, but working-class white men are not included in any kind of quota for the BBC or any other institiutions that I know of. Unless you count prisons or the armed forces.

Somebody should probably point out that they're in breach of UK employment law then, since quotas are illegal in Britain.

Well then it's fundamentally racist. Excluding working class people means excluding a greater proportion of ethnic minorites than white people, since the higher up the social scale you go, the whiter it gets.

Actually, I do believe that the BBC has an irritatingly liberal slant to to it on most subjects, but that's a quite different issue from whether or not it's anti-white or anti-working class.

Are you seriously saying that white people are excluded from the BBC? REALLY? Count the black and brown faces hosting any show on BBC radio or TV. If you take out the Asian Network, it's overwhelmingly white and middle class. I'd be willing to bet that apart from the people cleaning the buildings, the BBC is not as ethnically diverse as any of the areas it has its biggest offices.

200% inflation in housing costs is way off the mark. In real terms, inflation in house prices from 1997 to now was round about 100% from base to peak, and about 150% in absolute terms. Since there's already been a "correction" (starting in 2007 and which appears to be ongoing), and the fact that 1997 was about the lowest the market got after the crash of the mid-90s, it's also about the most dramatic comparison possible. It's a bubble that will slowly deflate over the next few years and will probably not inflate in the same way again, since the mortgage market has changed (hopefully permanently) as a result of the banking disaster.

I'll just note that I despise the entire concept of a property bubble, but if you look at the facts, this wasn't a case of poor people being priced out of the market. In reality, it was a combination of poor people being drawn into a market they couldn't really afford by dirt-cheap mortgages that took less account of old-fashioned markers like ability to pay and increasing speculation based on the very fact that there was a boom. The real cost of buying a house actually didn't inflate at the same speed as the simple price of houses either, since interest rates were generally pretty low and mortgages were structured to let people keep their payments low for the first few years.

If you want to talk about Labour's economic crimes, try talking about PFI and the de-funding of public sector pensions. In my view, those are the most obscene things Blair and Brown did, financially. But then if you attack them, you have to attack the party that introduced PFI (and still wholeheartedly supports it) and which hates public sector jobs, never mind their pensions.

Chris brought facts and figures and a reasonable question about perceptions being fuelled by a fairly racist newspaper industry. Happ brought some "PC GONE MAD" assertions. Which one is engaging in discussion?

You won't ever catch me arguing about how shit public sector IT procurement is. In my current job, we're still awaiting the development of a system that was first put into development more than ten years ago. I've never understood, though, why people assume that the public sector HAS to be inefficient. All it takes is some better management and, in many cases, government not sticking its nose in every five minutes to satisfy some mindless tabloid demand by setting unreasonable targets that distract from the real purpose of the service, and things would improve. I'm even easing up in some ways on the necessity of certain services being provided by the public sector. However, cutting important (if not absolutely vital)services without knowing that there's an alternative in place is reckless and stupid.

As far as "completely unnecessary" goes, I don't know that that isn't true. Making cuts when times are tough is a risky move. Increasing the dole queues helps no-one. At least if people are employed by the state, they're spending the money they earn in the private sector. If they're on JSA, they're broke and spending nothing. I understand the philosophy that says they add nothing to the economy, but that's not exactly true. The success of the economy has as much to do with velocity of circulation as it does with GDP. Besides, the deficit we're running is really not all that huge. The national debt can be paid off in one stroke when we sell our God-forsaken banking assets. I'd rather see real investment in job creation (and I've proposed a number of ways to do that elsewhere in this thread) than cuts. Cuts inevitably mean someone, somewhere suffering. Investment sees someone, somewhere celebrating. Cuts may be necessary in some places, but without doing something to re-develop and re-balance out economy, it won't make any positive difference to the vast majority of people.

But let's admit some truths here.

Just saying they're "truths" doesn't make it so, Loki.

- Public spending under Labour had reached truly unsustainable proportions, and there were going to have to be cuts whatever party or parties got into power.

"Truly unsustainable"? With public sector debt lower than the G20 average and the term of most of that debt longer than the G20 average? I've said several times that I'm not against working towards a budget surplus, but you say that as if it's an absolutely unarguable fact. It's not. In fact, all the evidence says that we are (and consistently have been) in a better financial position than most of our peers.

- In a coalition, neither Tories nor Lib Dems were going to be able to fulfil all of their manifesto promises, clearly, as they were going to have to compromise with each other to achieve anything. To accuse them of hypocrisy is a bit strong.

Trading off one manifesto commitment for another is part of coalition building. I think most people understand that. It's quite different for the Liberal candidates to sign a personal pledge to vote against any rise in tuition fees, then backtrack as soon as they got into power.

- Cameron and Clegg are probably ideologically closer to each other than they are to the far reaches of their own parties.

True. But two wrongs don't make a right.

The things I DO feel betrayed about are the pathetic way in which the coalition have cosied back up to the banks. I always knew the Tories weren't going to stick the knife into their mates in the banking sector on their own, but I hoped that the Lib Dems would give them a reason to.

It's as if you believe that ANY of the three major parties have any interest in serving the interests of any constituency other than big business. It's quite cute, really.

But more than anything, it's the lack of a vote on PR that has made me lose the faith. The Lib Dems came out of the coalition negotiations with fuck all, as far as I can tell.

But there's going to be a referendum, isn't there? Or did I miss something in the last few days?

To be fair, SSB, you were a bit of a Daily Mail stereotype yourself there for a while. Do you believe that's all down to your own inherent flaws or were you a product of your environment?

I should point out that I don't consider myself a socialist. Capitalism is what we've got and in many ways, it works. But the main parties do not serve the interests of the people. They serve bg business to the exclusion of almost everyone else. I want to see a public infrastructure owned and run by and for the ordinary people, and an economic strategy that enables and encourages full participation by the largest possible number. Unsurprisingly, you could probably call me a distributionist.

They had a song called "Taxman." They were paying their 97.5% tax and still ended up incredibly wealthy before they ever figured out how to avoid paying quite so much. It's sometimes argued that the real reason they got their MBEs was because Brian Epstein encouraged them to dismantle a proposed tax shelter because it was "un-British."

I'm not suggesting it's possible. I think in this thread I said that if you instituted a 90% tax rate on earnings over

Yes, but philanthropy relies on people wanting to do nice things. The fact is that for every Carnegie or Buffett there's a Rupert Murdoch or five. If it were otherwise, there would never have been an aristocracy at all, nor would we be able to talk about the great "banking families" in the US. A 100% inheritance tax says very bluntly "you sink or swim on your own merits." If someone's parents are rich, they've already had a headstart that poor kids won't get, by having access to better education, better healthcare, contact with people of influence and so on. Why should they also get the cushiest tax set up on money they haven't even earned? Talking about a meritocracy and social mobility while giving the most generous tax cuts to people who aren't even earning the money the tax is no longer to be paid on is the most ricockulous hypocrisy.

And Ronnie - it wasn't consumer debt in and of itself that caused the financial crisis. It may have been naive of people to take on debt they couldn't afford but by and large, that isn't even really what happened. The banks loosening their lending criteria was not necessarily a bad thing, provided that the people borrowing could actually afford to repay it, and by and large most could. In a buoyant housing market it didn't really matter anyway, because they could always sell up if things got difficult. The problems came when defaults did start to happen and the banks had been so spectacularly irresponsible as to structure, buy and sell debt obligations without any real clue as to the real risk or value of those packages. As it turns out, many of them weren't half as "toxic" as was first feared, but that's part of the problem. The banks just didn't have a clue what was going on and couldn't be relied on to make rational decisions based on accurate information. Once that position was reached, collapse was inevitable for one or more of them.

Well, OK. Why should I, who don't even have a damn mortgage, be paying additional VAT and suffering cuts to the public services I use in order to pay for a gigantic bailout of some spectacularly irresponsible banks? Why not, at the very least, take every single penny of profit they make until their debt to the country is repaid, and then bump their tax up to make sure we've got something in store for the next time they fuck up? Because that's not how the game works. The poor pay for the mistakes of the rich. How many people actually responsible for any of the financial crisis lost their jobs as a result? Of those, how many are struggling by on JSA rather than an extravagant pension or a cosy non-executive directorship of another major financial institution? And how many poor people are signing on and being told that their meagre benefits are going to be cut because "we have to balance the books"? If you can't see how utterly unfair that scenario is, you really shouldn't be trying to talk about it.