Taxpayer may get £500bn liability

b0rker

Cleaver wrote: »

I find it hard to say '(b)w!nker' slowly, let alone at any
speed.

Okay yes that was rather convoluted considering the context.

Just as well the decision I made there didn't affect the finances of circa 60 million people.

Then I would feel like a right (b)w!nker.

b0rker

Generali wrote: »

Not really. It's more like a drunk blaming the pub landlord.

The reasonably financially renumerated pub landlord will have the sense to throw the drunk out when he starts to become abusive.

If only the sickeningly overpaid bankers had the intelligence required to adopt the same level of risk assesment.

In fact any risk assesment would have been a start.

Dan:_4

Generali wrote: »

Not really. It's more like a drunk blaming the pub landlord.

Bar staff are not supposed to serve intoxicated people!

I understand where your coming from, but the banks were quite ruthless at shoving credit under peoples faces. Not a week went by where I didn't have an offer for a credit card or loan through the post. And you couldn't even pop in the branch without getting hassel to take on credit.

ultra10

The Working Class I fear will desert Labour ... Give it 10 years & the " Main Opposition" Will be either the BNP or Liberals ....Labour rode the wave of Economic growth well, now there day of reckoning

piggeh

Indeed, to take the analogy further it's like blaming a drunk when the landlord has shoved his favourite drink under his nose and told him he can pay him next week and he can have it at happy hour prices.

treliac

Generali wrote: »

Not really. It's more like a drunk blaming the pub landlord.

The drunk needs protection from himself. As already said, bar staff shouldn't serve the inebriated.

The average member of the public is not very numerate and, as we have seen, very many have been enticed into over-commitment of their finances in order to 'buy' themselves a home. Especially if (once) reputable financial institutions have encouraged them to see themselves as credit-worthy when they clearly weren't.

Unfortunately, human nature inclines some to make very foolish decisions. I'm not in favour of letting people run like lemmings into making serious mistakes, with long lasting consequences for their families as well as themselves. I've seen too much misery as the result of immature and uninformed decision-making.

Does anyone think that out of the tens of thousands who will face repossession, there will be many who would have gone ahead and taken mortgages if they could have forseen the consequences for themselves and their dependents? No, they were badly let down by the greed that prompted increasingly irresponsible lending.

By not providing the right level of protection / regulation, society opens up the gap between haves and have nots, achievers and no-hopers ever and ever wider.

Rochdale_Pioneers

And how much bank assets have we also come to control? Another figure above £1tn bandied about - which is meaningless if you don't balance it off against their assets.

purch

one of the ones marching in the street.

I wonder how many of the rioters will actually be taxpayers ?

bubblesmoney

Rochdale_Pioneers wrote: »

And how much bank assets have we also come to control? Another figure above £1tn bandied about - which is meaningless if you don't balance it off against their assets.

bet the assets wont mean much if marked to market value rather than marked to model (marked to model = valuation conjured up in the clouds). if the derivatives were forced to be marked to market and put on the banks books as such, they would mostly be bust because of zero market capitalisation the very next day on the stock markets. along with them they would drag down anyone (including the govt) who guarantees their debts. guaranteeing savers deposits is one thing but guaranteeing stupidly dished out debts is another thing.

what they are doing by starting a bad debt insurance scheme is to take the responsibility for the bad debts on to the tax payers books. privatising the profits and socialising the losses. they could have instead used the 500 billion or a far lesser amount to capitalise a 'good' bank up from scratch and let the bad ones go bust and sell the good assets by prepack administration deals to the newly capitalised 'good' bank. that would have been a more safer approach for the tax payer, jobs would have been saved as the 'good' bank will need employees as well, share holders of banks that were bad will get wiped out, the bad debt gets written off as losses for who ever carried it on their books or gets sold on for a fraction of what it was worth supposedly earlier, good debt gets sold on to the better performing banks, no debt burden for the tax payer.

first thing that needs to be done is to forcibly make every financial institution to come clean on their accounting and declare their debt and credit as marked to market. if any institution lies then make sure their board and any employee involved in the cover up does serious jail time, seize their assets as proceeds of crime. only then will these pips squeak and come clean on the true nature of their bad debts. painful in the short term but will be over quicker and less carp for the tax payer to bear. once the pips squeak then let the market decide what their value is, the good ones will survive, the bad ones will face the music, capitalism rocks !

ps: also really make sure the people who took on the bad loans pay their due share as well for their part in the mess

thriftybabe

My old boss has a lot to answer for (Fred Goodwin). I think these guys should be made bankrupt themselves. They are all sitting pretty with their big pay offs and multimillion pound houses. Take them down and that should recoup a bit of money back to the taxpayers!