There's something going on in Europe.
They want much stricter controls on dodgy financial practices, such as exotic derivatives. The City of London does not.
They want much stricter controls on banks so that they do not become 'too big to fail' and can hold governments to ransom (as has just happened). The City of London does not.
The FT is reporting that Bilderberger Angela Merkel said on Monday,
"No bank should be allowed to become so big that it can blackmail governments,".
You may recall that about a month ago superBilderberger Josef Ackermann of Deutsche Bank wrote in the FT that banks should be allowed to become absolutely huge in order to facilitate globalisation.
There is a whiff of a rebellion here.
But the only way I will truly accept that a rebellion is going in the ranks of Bilderberg is if the rebels got together and wrote a book entitled Memoirs of Bilderberg, and tell all.
And the man who can redeem himself by resigning from his current position and managing the production of such a book by becoming the first to write his memoirs of Bilderberg is our inglorious Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
================================
From http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2a42860e-9642-11de-84d1-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=8cf8b7ea-0e1c-11de-b099-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
Berlin bids to halt ‘too big to fail’ banking
By Bertrand Benoit and Chris Bryant in Berlin
Published: August 31 2009 16:41 | Last updated: August 31 2009 19:50
Germany is calling on the world’s largest economies to adopt joint measures to prevent banks from becoming “too big to fail” and holding governments to ransom in future financial crises.
Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, said on Monday – following a meeting in Berlin with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France – that steps to prevent excessive risk-taking by large banks should rank high on the agenda of the summit of the Group of 20 largest economies in Pittsburgh later this month.
“No bank should be allowed to become so big that it can blackmail governments,” Ms Merkel said.
Meanwhile, in a letter to counterparts from the G20 sent late last week, Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, urged members to agree on “international rules that facilitate the insolvency and liquidation of large, internationally active banks”.
The proposal, which comes ahead of a G20 finance ministers’ meeting in London on Friday and Saturday, is among the most concrete steps floated by a government so far in response to the dilemma posed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the US a year ago.
The bankruptcy caused the world’s financial infrastructure to seize up as banks stopped lending to each other in anticipation of further insolvencies. The crisis forced governments and central banks to intervene by injecting massive amounts of capital and liquidity into their paralysed financial sectors and bailing out large banks.
In his letter, Mr Steinbrück wrote: “It has proved unavoidably necessary to rescue banks from insolvency, if they are large and relevant to the continued functioning of the banking system, in order to prevent damage to our countries’ economies. This is not an acceptable situation.”
As one solution, he proposed a co-ordinated reform of insolvency laws across the world’s largest economies so that governments would be able to allow future Lehman Brothers to fail without undermining confidence in the entire sector or triggering strings of defaults at other banks.
One Berlin official said the measure would discourage large banks from assuming “that they will always be bailed out no matter what.”
Officials said talks had already taken place at the working level within the G20 on additional measures that could prevent banks from becoming so large as to threaten their countries’ economies.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
No comments:
Post a Comment