If the bloody world could see that our two major banks were a pile of excrement, then what does it say about the government which could not ?

Governments are not there to prop up institutions unless they are publicly owned !

If they wanted to help they could have nationalised it fully and helped out those who had a mortgage with said institutions and covered them with FSCS limits. Shareholders could get stuffed and employees who acted recklessly could also be sent a clear warning.

Ordinary hard working people would have been saved years of agony in the form of austerity !

Instead Brown just gave the bankers a wad of money to carry on at the casinos, bars, and gentlemans clubs. The city was flush with money, drinks flowed, staff partied and the frenzy went on.

In fact senior bankers were telling staff to get the wealthy clients to maximise on their lending facilities ie you have a mortgage of £300k but your facility is for £750k - take it and both, you as clients have cheap money to invest, and and I as a banker get my bonus - that is the reality for the wealthy - contrast that to the hardworking poor whose mortgage had come up for renewal - sorry we cannot lend to you as you do not meet the criteria set by the government !

So which is the greater evil, the government which opened to doors for abuse or the bank which has been given guidelines around the manner in which to carry out the abuse.

UK Banking sector contributed £41bn of tax revenues in FYE23, c£39bn in FYE22. I think that's direct corporate tax, not including personal taxation of employees.

Only a couple of banks (NatWest etc) were supported by bail outs.

Its difficult to imagine how our society - private individuals (free bank accounts / card payments / direct debits / standing Orders etc..) or corporates (working capital / payment processing / debt etc) etc etc would survive if banks did not exit ?

MMT... Keynsianism on stilts. Debt doesn't matter, nor do interest payments of £350,000,000 per day and rising. Until the whole thing collapses...

Cameron and Osborne saw the GFC as a chance to shrink the state - Conservative ideology.. You've got it right at last - there is no "black hole". and there is no need to balance the budget either. Historically, governments never have.

Quite clearly there is a limit to how much deficits can be, and similarly debts too. But in theory we can be in debt perpetually, and even at an increasing amount.

Think of your mrotgage on your home. If you live forever, you can keep releasing equity forever, as prices continue to rise. It is sustainable as long as you can service the debt, which will usually mean your incomes will rise.

The economy rises over time, usually with bumps along the way, and sometimes these bumps are so big that the debts can be a problem.

The GFC was a banking crisis. Incredibly complex and interconnected. There were many parties to blame. Do you plame the regulators? Politicians who put the regulators in charge? Bankers who created the leverage in the system without care of the risks iinvolved? Rating agencies who were paid to over inflate the true credit quality of sub prime? The strippers and unemployed who thought it was ok to borrow money on ARM mortgages?

The basic issue with banking is lending out long term with short term deposits. Time after time we get these banking crises and it is usually this lend long term borrow short term that causes these issues. GFC was based on this but made 10000x worse because complex derivatives were involved, everyone was doing it and it was so interconnected that it was hard to see there was a problem until there was (although some people saw it and made out like bandits - the people in finance not surprisingly).

The GFC was a major turning point. It was the start of a period where growth rates in the economy were not at all assured. Debts needed to be carefulyl managed. Banks became much more risk averse despite all the QE programs and bank recaps. Argulably we are sitll in this era today albiet perhaps with higher inflation.

If governments decide to go into surplus, it'll have to come out from somewhere else, either the hosuehold sector or corporate.