Banks must pay

“Bad bank, good bank, any bank will do”, is Chancellor George Osborne’s latest political pre-election battle-cry for the Royal Bank of Scotland problem.

The semantics of transferring “toxic assets” (bad debts) of about £50 billion off UK plc on to a to-be-created Bad Bank is more befitting George Orwell’s Newspeak or Lewis Carroll’s White Queen: “Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.” Here, assets = liabilities; credit = debt; real money = surreal money.

We cannot escape our debts, no matter what advice from UBS, Black Rock and other pundits. Osborne said that “the new good bank would then be better placed to support the British economy”. Well, what about government doing that also?

Let us not forget also the £77bn debt we took over from two bankrupt mortgage lenders, Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock Asset Management.

So, unless and until our politicians stand up against the cabal of global financiers and their minion bankers, we the people will be forced by debt into complete subjection, then slavery. The way out of this mess is as follows: banks must face the consequences of risk themselves. No more bailouts.

Banks must not be allowed to magically create their own loan money out of nothing, thus inflating our money supply. Their reserves should be moved up to 100 per cent instead of today’s less than 10 per cent. Banks should be banned from lending to the mortgage market (cause of sub-prime problems in US to start with). Mutualised building societies prior to 1986 in UK were the safe providers of loans to house buyers.

Ronald Rankin

Dalkeith, Midlothian