This blog has frequently posted opprobrium about modern banking and its corrosive effect upon the well-being of the British economy, of which it is far too large a slice. The latest disaster of dishonest fixing of the LIBOR rate, drives home a simple truth almost entirely lost in the modern culture of greed and selfishness. It is that if you pay excessive rewards for jobs which could, if needed at all, be done by good honest people for very much less, you end up getting not the best people, but the worst. This truth is now starting to dawn.
Another is beginning to take shape in the collective consciousness. These banks, which boast balance sheets bigger than nations, are destroying the viability of the economies of which they are supposed to be a part. They contribute nothing of value to anyone or anything other than to themselves and those they directly employ, yet they consume the resources of others. They suck money from the base of the economy in order to fund the alchemy called investment banking, they invent and sell dodgy and dishonest financial products and they demand capital from the taxpayer to keep them solvent.
Behind them lies a road scattered with social deprivation, unemployment, out of date industry, poor infrastructure, excessive housing costs, massive benefit bills and flat-lining growth, over which hangs the dark cloud of the greatest volume of total debt of any country in the developed world.
In the past, when industries were felt to exploit their advantage for their own gain with little regard for the public good or the welfare of ordinary people, they were nationalised and taken into public ownership. We are drawing ever closer to a point when a modern form of sate ownership of the banking system may become the most popular option for taxpayers and politicians. Some way has to be found to claw back the £trillions taken by the few from the many with such greedy abandon.