Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Curbing the Banks

There are reports of earnest and productive talks going on between the banks and the government to improve relations and find common ground for a way froward. The apparent curb on bank bashing, an important talisman for all the parties in the general election, seems to be about needing the banks to achieve economic recovery.

That is self evident. Nobody, certainly not this Blog, is saying or has said that we do not need the banks. What we do not need are banks that are only marginally solvent, which favour property to all other form of lending thus inflating assets beyond their worth to the detriment of living standards and the economy, which engage in wild and ridiculous speculations for which they do not have capital to cover losses when they go bad and who then come begging the taxpayer for help, threatening they are too big to fail, after they have already stashed their own pockets with remuneration little short of preposterous.

We need a sound and socially useful banking system which is financially secure, prudently run and able to play an important role in the re-design of a shatterd economic model, which can then be re-built into a secure and lasting recovery. Such banks will value the national interest as highly or beyond their own, as this is an element, little mentioned, of any attempt to create a big society. Such banks will also separate their speculative trading into ring fenced companies which can and will be allowed to fail, in which such failures both the bankers and their shareholders, who have profited to excess from these gambling activities, will then lose  all.

Latest Wikileaks

This blog has been relaxed about Wikileaks thus far. Mostly they have been about who thinks what of whom in diplomatic cables mixed with analysis of foreign governments, which does not accord with official statements. This is not unhelpful in modern democracy, in which  there are too many hidden secrets which are not secrets at all, or if they are, too often classified to protect political positions rather than true national security. Voters have a right to know what is really being done by the people they vote for.

Today’s batch of revelations is rather different. This includes a list of various installations around the world that the U.S. regards as central to its national security. There are two implications. Although none of the locations is a secret establishment according to initial reports, providing a handy list may very well help some terrorist organization, many of which are relatively unsophisticated and under resourced, as well as under pressure both from security agencies and their own followers.

Another reason is that many of these locations are in countries with a lower, or much lower, rating as a potential terrorist target than the United States itself. It would be wrong for them to be moved closer to the firing line because they have a facility which produces something the U.S. needs, or thinks it needs. For example the strategic importance of Australian anti-snake venom is unclear.

It is now important for Wikileaks and the newspapers involved in the publication of highlighted documents, to consider very carefully whether what they do really is good for democracy and freedom or whether it is bad for both those things but good for selling newspapers. There is a Rubicon here and it must not be crossed.