How banks really work

This is another letter to the editor that followed Alistair McConnachie’s.

Hayek calls for reforms of financial system

Switzerland’s king of watchmaking, Nicolas G. Hayek, has called for rapid and sweeping reforms of the global financial system to allow innovation to flourish.

Asked how we should get out of the present dilemma that was triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, Hayek had no doubts that bankers should no longer be allowed to act alone.

“We should not let only bankers run and control the financial system but have a joint venture with real entrepreneurs, industrialists and financial people to reorganise it all.”

Here’s why he says it has to start in Switzerland:

“I don’t want it to start from Switzerland but it’s the only country from where you can start it.

“In the United States they won’t have enough credibility, in Britain they won’t have it, the Germans won’t start it and the French neither. The Chinese are not interested in it and the Indians neither. Who else is going to do it? We are forced to do it.”

Here’s the whole story.

How the banks never lose

Channel IV Dispatches did it again: hit the nail on its head!

How the banks never lose ends in the CEOs of the five big banks all refusing to be interviewed on camera…

The questions are: do the banks care? Can they afford not to care? We’ll see what the Treasury’s Committee on Banking Reform will propose…

No hope for the planet unless we reform economy

John-Paul Flintoff from TimesOnline Green Central as spelled it out in mortgage-related terms – by relying on the Money as Debt video to do the more complicated work. He even refers to usury and to one of our Early Day Motions Green Credit for Green Growth.

His article No hope for the planet unless we reform economy is the third in Green Central on Times Online and has already created a heated albeit ignorant response.

One does have to wonder as the video asks: why does everybody study and know about love but not about money? How come people know how babies are made but not how money is produced?

Why do the bankers keep that secret to themselves? Why does it cost a licence to open a bank to buy and sell mortgages and debts but not to buy and sell apples and pears?

Banks warned to curb payout as crisis bites

What does the story below tell us?

Like most people, bankers think first of themselves and their salaries, payouts, pensions and perks.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew that banking was carried out as a public service instead?

With thanks from David Soori:

BANK OF England governor Mervyn King used his now-famous meeting with the chief executives of the “big five” UK banks last Thursday to admonish them for increasing shareholder dividends, as they came begging for more aid to help resolve their liquidity problems, the Sunday Herald understands.
http://tinyurl.com/2aleo8