Thursday 21 January 2010

"The rest of the world will follow"

In previous posts, I stated that the world should reinstate a version of the Glass-Steagall act, which was a legal statute placing a firewall between retail banking and investment banking operations. It was instated as a result of the last time these same circumstances came about, the 1930's Great Depression, and was repealed in 1999 -- yes, that's right, just before we had the Dot Com speculative bonanza and blow-up, and then the mortgage-finance speculative bonanza and blow-up.

This, in my opinion, is something that simply must be done, if the political elites of this world truly wish to stand any hope of avoiding a repeat of the recent financial and economic crisis.

In a more recent post I went so far as to suggest the USA must take the lead on this initiative, and then everyone else would fall into line quickly behind them.


Well, I am not at all disappointed to see this very day that our own George Osborne has come out shooting from the hip on the very same day that Barak Obama floated the idea in a press release, saying that if (when, please god) the Conservatives are elected, they will do exactly that -- follow the lead of the USA on this issue.

Boy, I hope they just act on this and do it soon-as. Even if the banks do all hate it and stop funding election campaigns so generously... Boo-friggin-hoo!

1 comment:

DP said...

Further to this, Robert Peston has a blog entry up this evening discussing this same topic I just noticed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/01/obama_to_break_up_banks.html

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