Ghastly Dance: Financial Repression

It's a rule: governments act in their own interests, and so do monopolists. For most of human history, these two look each other in the eye, and like what they see. Soon enough, no-one else gets a look in.

It now seems inevitable that this ghastly mutual attraction is once again going to shoulder aside the interests of you and me and the rest of the economy, let alone the interests of fairness or even prudential common sense, in the re-shaping of the banking industry. Naturally enough, it comes tricked out in the most reasonable and ethically self-congratulating disguise: in order to ensure that greedy bankers never again etc, the government's going to ensure raised bank reserve and capital requirements, are going to keep an eye (and maybe a thumb) on the amount of credit extended, and doubtless provide a guiding hand to ensure the right people get the credit.

I could go on - and probably will soon enough. But suffice it to say that what's being proposed as our salvation is simply financial repression in one guise or another. Oh, it'll mean your savings are allocated even more poorly than before (which matters if you want a pension or an economic infrastructure), but never mind, it's for your own good. In fact, it's very markedly for the government's good, because if the government can mandate (or regulate) a monopoly position for banks, it'll be able to tax them both overtly (stand by for windfall taxes) and covertly (by creating a captive market for their debt).

Meanwhile, for the incumbents - ie, for the bankers - all the regulation is just a further entrenchment of a monopoly power which they have already abused to very nearly the destruction of the entire economy.

And the logical outcome of this is, of course, that there are plenty of people who want to get on-board this new financial repression/financial monopoly gravy train. Step forward Metro Bank, step forward Virgin Money. And step forward Lord Levene, a former chairman of Lloyds of London - a man so keen to pitch himself into this new monopoly that he's raising money on the AIM market before he has even put in the time to think of a name for his wretched bank. As someone might once have put in their prospectus: 'a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is' called.

I wonder - I seriously wonder - whether the politicians of all stripe who lobby for this disgraceful entrenchment of failure, know what they are doing. Can they be so bereft of imagination that they don't know what they are doing? Can they not grasp that there is an alternative which takes apart the monopoly, rather than entrenches it?

'Now all my tales are proved untrue,

And I must face the men I slew.

What tales will serve me here among

Mine angry and defrauded young?'