UK Treasury officials are locked in talks with the Bank of England after Metro Bank’s shares plunged by more than 31%.
The bank is now seeking £600 million to boost its balance sheet and stave off closure and a financial collapse.
Metro Bank has hired the Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley to oversee its capital raising plans and hopes to raise £250m in equity and an additional £350m in debt.
As part of its effort Metro Bank was seeking a buyer for a £3bn chunk of its mortgage book, including NatWest and the Lloyds Banking Group.
Shares in Metro Bank have now plunged by almost two-thirds since the delay with the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRU).
The lender has in fact lost nearly 98% of its value since floating on the London Stock Exchange in 2016 when it was worth £1.5bn.
The Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans Pritchard wrote on Sunday of the current world crisis, that ‘A very slow burning fuse has finally and suddenly reached the powder keg confirming the Dornbusch adage that financial crises always take longer than you think, but then unfold much faster than you expected.’
Almost half of America’s 4,800 banks are sitting on assets worth far less than their liabilities, according to a study by leading bank experts.
One city banker who was asked when the collapse would begin commented: ‘Sooner or later the US economy will snap and the world economy will snap with it, and this will short circuit the rise in Bond yields.’
The bankers’ solution is ‘just buy gold’ and starve the working class!
The ruling classes’ solution is to make the working class pay the full bill for the crisis of the capitalist system with wage cuts, mass unemployment and starvation!
The bosses are relying on the trade union and Labour bureaucracy being able to hold back the struggle of the working class to the point where the ruling class has the advantage and is able to force the working class to pay the full bill for the crisis, using the power of the capitalist state, with its sadistic and corrupt police forces, to impose 1930s- style conditions and a 1930s solution to their crisis.
Workers already know that the cost of living is soaring and that their families are being pauperised by the bankrupt capitalist system.
There is only one way forward and this is for the working class to use its strength to smash the crisis ridden capitalist system.
This requires the rapid building up of the revolutionary leadership of the WRP and the Young Socialists to organise and lead the British Socialist revolution.
Now is the time to build a mass Young Socialists movement as the basis of the Workers Revolutionary Party that will be able to provide the necessary revolutionary leadership so that the trade unions are able to stop capitalism with a general strike – leading directly to a socialist revolution and the working class taking the power and establishing a workers’ republic and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the UK!
For this task the working class needs a revolutionary party to give revolutionary leadership. This will use the full power of the trade unions to smash capitalism and go forward to a planned and nationalised socialist economy.
The working class has built up huge productive forces. Under Socialism these will be used to build a Communist society whose motto will be ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.’
Capitalism is now breaking apart at the seams, but will not leave the scene of history of its own accord.
Now is the time to build the Young Socialists and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country, to lead the struggle to replace capitalism with a World Socialist Republic.
Capitalism is in its death agony.
Join the WRP and the YS now to lead the developing British socialist revolution to its victory!
