Sunday Posts

The report on Banking is due, and the bankers are trying to do what they do best: Use the back-channel to flout the rules. In a sense, the only timely thing Alistair Darling has done in his entire career seemed to be the publication of his memoir, where he reminded people how fascinatingly arrogant the banking bosses are, and how they effectively demanded a bail-out and held the British government at ransom. They are indeed at it again, and there are various conciliatory signals coming from the Downing Street.  The key issue is whether the retail banks can be separated from the investment banking operations of these huge banks, whose combined balance sheets are five times the size of UK's GDP, and therefore, they can be stopped from gambling with Jo Public's money. During the last crisis, the bankers took their 'too big to fail' position as granted and did whatever they want to do, and governments across the world, fearing a meltdown of the system, simply handed th...

If the stock markets are to be believed, the US and the European economies are on the verge of a double-dip, a second recession in three years, which will possibly, inescapably perhaps, lead into a long great depression, the second time in modern history. Whether or not that really happens, one thing is clear: If we thought the recession of 2008 would be a short-lived affair, it turned out to be far more persistent. With governments and central banks across the OECD countries frozen into a rudderless chaos, as against their initial strident response with big stimulus and matching rhetoric, we can only expect the worst now. And, if this happens, this will transform our societies completely and reshape history, remember the last great depression ended in a global war and ensuing detente lasting over six decades, and these days and weeks would go down in history when we brought this upon ourselves, through our collective senselessness. The warning signs were all there. In 2008, we kne...