Revealed by a great IoS piece last weekend – but spectacularly missing from other British media (and easily read here) – is the reality that has been obvious to some of us for nearly four years now: RBS has ‘a £100bn black hole in its finances’ due to ‘five broad areas of alleged criminality and wrongdoing’.
‘The Treasury, the FSA [Financial Services Authority] and the Bank of England all turned a deaf ear to the complaints from the banks’ millions of ‘victims’ and paid scant heed to the overall balance-sheet strength – capital, liquidity and asset quality – of British banks’, says the Zero Hedge piece.
Bur meanwhile, the new CEO “can’t see any evidence to substantiate” the myriad claims against the Bank that Hester let fester, for which feat he became the Treasury’s favourite person.
Top financial journalist Ian Fraser writes that “ “Morality and ethics were thrown out the window and we saw the mis-selling of rip-off products on an epic scale – including the scandals of payment protection insurance and interest-rate swap agreements sold to small and medium sized enterprises.”
He’s not wrong….indeed, The Slog has been on Hester’s case now for some three years. The bank’s increasing fragility means a race against time for George Osborne…will the bank go bust before May 2015?
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party is this week trying to beguile ordinary donors with an email about creating two million more private sector jobs. These jobs have, the Tories claim, brought “the security of a pay packet” to two million people.
It’s all drivel of course, because (a) the private sector cowboys involved in finding jobs lie routinely about how many they have filled, in order to bump up the income (b) there is no security at all any more for anyone beyond the highest plc director or Whitehall Sir Humphrey in Britain’s deregulated slave-market, and (c) almost all of the jobs involve fewer hours at lower hourly rates.
So it was left to the Daily Telegraph this morning to admit that wage data show clearly how prices are rising far more quickly than salaries.
The simple consequence of this irresponsible job-creation claim is that consumers remain less and less able to, um, consume…and thus it is something of a no-brainer that they will not only buy less: they will of course also buy cheaper Asian imports when they do.
So the real economy will continue to struggle, and the deficit will get bigger. And – once the inevitable RBS collapse has happened, the deficit will be bigger still…and/or, there will be a bailin requiring the Hard Working Families this shower claim to care about to cough up yet more, and thus consume even less…thus slowing down the economy further….and so on ad infinitum et ad nauseam.
The Conservative Party Donorthon email asks you to cough up £10. If you want to pay ten quid to a bunch of sociopaths about to legalise the removal of twenty thousand quid form your RBS “savings” accounts, then go ahead. It’s a free country, and it’s your call.
The Slog 