Dear Darling
The nationalisation of Northern Rock is a colossal indictment of the company’s mangement, the country’s system of financial regulation and the Government’s economic competence. For six months, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have been at pains to point out that the problems in the financial markets did not originate in Britain. The credit crunch, they have rightly noted, has been a global phenomenon, triggered by the downturn in the US housing market. German banks and American financial businesses have gone cap in hand to their governments too. But it has been in Britain - and only in Britain - that the market turmoil has resulted in a run on a high street bank and, now, the humiliation of taking a private financial institution into public ownership. Not so long ago, Britain liked to boast that its financial regulatory regime was the envy of the world. The credibility of new Labour has been rooted in the Government’s record of impressive economic stewardship. The desperate decision to nationalise Northern Rock will tarnish both Britain’s and Mr Brown’s reputation.
Lord, all we had to deal with was congress fiddling with the risk of stupid peoples’ mortgages.
February 19th, 2008 at 12:24 am
“…the humiliation of taking a private financial institution into public ownership”.
If you reversed “private” and “public” it could be a sentence from a Thatcher era newspaper. A good indication of progress, I suppose.
February 19th, 2008 at 7:32 am
Darling shops at my local Waitrose, for what it’s worth.
The fault’s all Brown’s. He put in the system of bank regulation which failed catastrophically when put to the test. So the humiliation’s properly his.
Though I must say I’ve always found the idea of a bank run by Geordies somewhat improbable. In this case the guys running the bank weren’t even bankers, amazingly enough.