bathildabagshot1
You said ”I mentioned this earlier, but similar regulation here was removed by the Thatcher government in the 1980s.”
Once again a sweeping statement with NO qualification, as back then in the 1980s unless you were rich you could not get a bank mortgage loan or a home, are you talking about a more technology inspired availability of credit to the masses that also helped working class people buy their own council homes for the first time – and again, what the feck does Thatcher have to do with Gordon Browns following of ex Fed Chairman Greenspan and others, trying to dismantle the Glass-Steagall Act – by allowing UK banks to expand their balance sheets to dangerous, unprecedented levels.
If Gordon Brown admitted he mess up, the FSA agreed that it was under government pressure TO relax credit, it should be good enough for you.
Until the Labour movement ‘grows some’ and recognises, never mind acknowledge their own mistakes in the 1970s and 2000s, and STOP blaming Thatcher who was PM from 1979 to 1990, they will never be fit to govern – especially as the present numpty is offering the worst of the 1970’s and 2000s as ‘new, alternative politics’.
And
” Sub prime mortgages had been available, but far less common and the private institutions that offered them were more risk averse. Again private sector behaviour caused the extremely risky lending.”
Sub Prime mortgages were thriving and a good social tool from the 1930’s in America, until, as you say, the banks rather than the government got hold of them, but based on the lowering of intermediary broker standards of who qualify, the U.S. governments financial regulatory authorities, bear some responsibility for allowing it to happen in hundreds of $billions of securitized mortgages ratings agencies were rating ‘AAA’.
In the UK, as Brown changed to UK financial regulation to a tripartite where he controlled two out of the three regulators, and UK banks like Northern Rock and the Halifax were followed similar models to the U.S. Sub Prime mortgage lending by ‘packaging up’ UK mortgages and ‘securitizing’ them – the FSA (Brown formed) as shown earlier, acknowledges the that they dropped the financial ball, due to government pressures on them.
The facts is, if in America and the UK, EXISTING regulations were adhered to, the U.S. crash would never have happened, and the UK banks (needed to power our economy out of any recession through lending) wouldn’t have been in some a bad balance sheet shape, that a few here would need to be part nationalised, rather than anywhere else in 2008.
So finally ”When the rest of the world followed his lead.”
So tell me, which countries and/or their regulators ‘dropped the ball’ as badly as the U.K and U.S. – as I remember Brown lecturing Europe on how THEY should de regulate their banks, and I don’t remember them biting.