THE farcically misnamed Banking Standards Commission (as if the banks had any standards) was created to try and prevent an even bigger banking collapse taking place than that which began in 2008, and is still continuing. It has recommended that former HBOS bosses Sir James Crosby, Andy Hornby and Lord Stevenson, who they blame for the bank’s collapse, should be banned from the financial sector.
It accused them of a ‘colossal failure’ of management at the bank which had to be rescued by the Labour government in 2008.
The members of the Commission are MPs, members of the House of Lords and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Heaven and hell are combining in a very belated but desperate attempt to save the banking system!
Halifax Bank of Scotland is now part of Lloyds Banking Group, which is currently 39% state-owned.
The Commission accused the bank of ‘reckless’ lending policies that resulted in losses of £46bn.
The report, called An Accident Waiting to Happen, said that £20.5bn of public money went into the rescue of HBOS before and after its merger with Lloyds.
It has been hailed as unprecedented for MPs and peers and Bishops to suggest that a group of senior bankers should be banned from working in the City.
However, the named trio are being used as scapegoats for the government and the ruling class as a whole, whose system has collapsed, beginning with the US subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 and the queues outside the Northern Rock Bank. It is a collapse that spread worldwide and has yet to reach its most critical point.
The trio are being made to resign various positions, in a desperate attempt to try and shield capitalism and its banking offshoot as a whole from the anger of the people. The crisis is the fault of these three stooges is the message from the Commission.
In fact, the masters of the world capitalist system were taught a lesson about the Law of Value in 2008, which, along with the governments of the day, they had decided was rubbish. They were convinced that paper masquerading as money, and all of the other promises to pay, could be regarded as money, and that its supply was now being managed so that there would never be another crisis of the system.
On the eve of the biggest bust of capitalism ever, PM Gordon Brown sold almost half of the UK’s gold reserves for euros! He declared that not only was gold massively overvalued, but that the government and the bankers, particularly himself, had learnt how to manage capitalism and had conquered the boom-to-bust cycle. He said this on the eve of the great collapse!
Even today, the UK banks are being told that they must build up their cash reserves so that they stand a chance of surviving the next plunge of the crisis.
Brown and the bankers, and the Tory party that supported Brown and whose leader Cameron modelled himself on Blair, were taught a lesson about value when all of the paper values collapsed; but they and the capitalist class learnt nothing and remain slaves and worshippers of the god of the ‘markets’.
Having gone from boom to bust, capitalism is now seeking to return to a new boom, and an even greater bust.
Leading the pack for the moment are the Japanese capitalists. Japan’s Nikkei has just topped 13,225 for first time since 2008, after the Bank of Japan said on Thursday it will increase its purchase of government bonds by 50tn yen (£350bn) annually, the equivalent of almost 10% of Japan’s gross domestic product, until the economy revives.
The Japanese yen has declined 4.5% against the US dollar in the past two days, and more than 5% against the euro. Japanese exports will now sell in Europe and the UK, forcing the US and UK capitalists into printing billions of paper notes and competitively devaluing their currencies driving inflation upwards and destroying living standards.
In fact, both austerity deflation and inflation are different weapons for use against the workers of the world. The only answer to this deepening of the capitalist crisis is the world socialist revolution.
