by Paul Crowe
Another day, another report telling us we need to be tougher on the banks. Today it’s the turn of the parliamentary commission on banking standards. In case you’re getting confused about which review is reporting now, this lot were set up by the government in response to the Libor scandal in summer.
The commission is a mish mash of MPs, peers and assorted others like Justin Welby, the soon to be archbishop of Canterbury. The top line of their report calls for the ring fence between retail and investment banking to be “electrified.” A vivid turn of phrase, yes, Helpful? Hardly.
For two years now there has been incessant legislative hand wringing about what to do about banking. The Vickers commission, the select committee and now this new banking commission, all speculating on the laws required to make sure the crash will never happen again.
Here’s a newsflash: ring-fencing and its associated regulations would not have stopped what happened in2007 and 2008 in the UK.
HBOS, Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley went down without having major investment banking divisions. Bad property deals are what brought down British banking.
Rarely has so much political and economic consideration been expended on laws that fundamentally fail to address the avowed purpose of the exercise.
If the net results of commissions such as this latest one were just a couple of forests felled to print hard copies of the final report, and some talking heads ventilating on the media, then the impact would be relatively harmless. A waste of time, and some resources, but nothing to hurt the fundamentals of the British economy.
But this isn’t what has happened.