To simplify my thinking I take the theoretical case of a man who successfully opened a television shop, and built up an empire throughout the UK. At 65 he retired and his son took over with disastrous results from bad management, with the consequent debts. No public body would dream of bailing him out. In the case of banks, they are the guardians of peoples’ savings which they use as a basis of their trading, and their other activities are nothing more nor less than barter, as with the television shop. Considering money as a commodity, then it is easy to realise that when a bank gives you a mortgage the transaction has the same connotation as purchasing on the never-never. What keeps the whole system afloat is the fact that people with surplus money lend to the bank, and those who need money, borrow, and the banks, overall, do a balancing act, between borrowing and lending , in the way bookmakers lay off. What happened was that the government took its eye off the ball when the banks started a competitive need to increase their status, come what may.
Initially forgetting about the overseas investments made by the banks, the repair system demands that those who had savings in the banking system, keeping the system afloat, not investments in banking products, should be compensated for their loss. The new system introduced should revert to something close to the building society model, with the government actually instituting its own banking system and buying up the UK properties from the existing banks at the current face value, or outstanding mortgage value, not the value at the time of the mortgage. This then aids the building society concept for the new government bank, and leaves the existing banks with the problems they have made for themselves. The banks after all are private companies, why should we be pumping money into them when we are not pumping it into failing businesses? Why should we, the taxpayer, be saddled with debts for purchases in other countries, just because the banks were based in this country? We are told that the money that has been lost is unrecoverable as a high proportion of it is stagnating in offshore banks. If that is the case it is tantamount to a vast sum of money being lost in a fire. It would therefore seem logical to irrevocably change the form that money takes so that that which is being stored off shore becomes obsolete, and it is then possible to print new money to fill the gap which otherwise would never be filled. Feeding our money back into a system that has so obviously failed, and for which we have no assurance that it will not fail again, seems ludicrous, against having a totally new banking system, state-controlled, including a national pension fund, and not in any way subject to the rise and fall of the money markets, which are an entirely different issue, subject to suspect trading