Roshan Doug: The taxpayer foots the bill for failed organisations
Am I the only person in this world who is horrified at the recent situation concerning the world of banking and the extent to which governments are going out of their ways to inject it with billions of pounds.
It’s monumentally hypocritical.
Our Government has put together £500 billion to save the incompetent banks within our country and thereby effectively nationalising them like Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley.
And this is money, which incidentally, belongs to the taxpayer.
How the Treasury found such a colossal amount – to spend on buying failing organisations – is mind-boggling especially given the almost desperate state of affairs concerning our social services, pensions, NHS and education.
And even this morning there’s little guarantee from our prime minister that this money will be spent responsibly by the banks concerned. There’s still very little evidence of checks and balances being put in place.
Now call me obtuse, but I really don’t understand why my money should go to paying off some rich fat cats in the city who have been having a reckless party for so many years – borrowing and lending money – without as much as a morsel of care? And just why should it be that the honest tax payer’s money should go in saving their backsides when they have been criminal with lending and investing funds belonging to banks? Surely there should have been safe guards – a series of effective regulatory mechanisms to ensure that investors like fund and hedge fund managers didn’t overstep their marks? And although our Chancellor is telling us that measures are being put in place to safe guard the economy in the future, why weren’t bonuses and dividends controlled previously? They clearly weren’t leaving high street banks and building societies offering customers mortgages worth up to, a staggering, six times their salaries.
To me there’s no doubt that the financial world has been behaving irresponsibly but it seems that our Government is hell bent in saving their friends in the city who, at the least, should be told to fend for themselves if not taken to court for their professional negligence and unethical conduct. I’m sorry, the whole thing just reeks of the old school network – it’s jobs for the boys in a climate of unprecedented arrogance!
Socialism? don’t make me laugh. In fact, it’s blatantly hypocritical.
With salaries for many people increasing by a mere fraction of the rate of inflation and the price of property, one doesn’t have to be Adam Smith or Karl Marx to understand that it was only a matter of time before the bubble burst, before the fat cats had an epiphany – the Damascus experience – that the money they were in dealing with was no more real than the digits on their computer screens.
In effect – and this is the horror of it all –they’ve been dealing almost solely with theory and hypothetical finance, projected forecasts and financial predictions of the value of shares/bonds. They’ve been working with estimations – pure guesswork – concerning profits and investments. Of course, their currency hasn’t been cold hard cash – tangible valued product – but Mickey Mouse money or simple IOUs in a game of Monopoly and thus ultimately worthless.
But sadly such estimated and vacuous figures produced by banks and building societies, have been the basis of our seemingly healthy economy which Gordon Brown has proudly presided over for eleven odd years.
In actual fact the state of the economy, which everyone has been talking so highly of, has been nothing more than an illusion. Well, it must have been because the growth of our economy is based largely on the growth of the property market which, we know has been in the hands of the city investors and banks and building societies. As such they should be held accountable for bringing the banking system tumbling down to its knees – not rewarded for their greed.
But my indignation of them goes deeper. As I said, there is something deeply abhorrent about the idea that the private sector can be injected with billions of pounds from the public purse. I’m sorry but if we believe in laissez-faire that the state should leave commerce and industry well alone, I don’t understand why governments are covering up for the very same organisations whose outlets and systems are integral to this mess. And it’s a fact – mark my words – that the chief executives of the large banks concerned are still going to get their bonuses, hefty pensions, golden hand shakes and all the other customary paraphernalia that go with being “successful” captains of industry.
All this will be going on right under our noses while our many pensioners will be covering themselves with blankets because they won’t be able to afford the fuel bills this winter. Democracy, capitalism, competition – they’re nothing but layers of illusion coated with government arrogance and hypocrisy.
