Thank you - Still on life support.

I am glad that you took the risk of aggravating the bank haters. However a word of caution - your style of dealing with facts rather than giving bloated opinion is misplaced in this dialogue. Also as your comments were entirely relevant to the original question you are out of kilter with many recent bizarre contributions - the most recent of which was a diatribe about the catholic church and the third reich !

Britain and its bankers have a symbiotic relationship going back ages. To put the boot in on the banks is like trampling on your own vegetable patch. More facts please about how the banking sector is a winning trump card.

Robert Court.

I don't really understand what you are on about and it irritates me that I can't resist responding when I should be drinking champagne with the other people on my yacht.

1. People behind counters ( retail) are a very small component and not very relevant to the " is banking good/bad " debate.
The banking that is good/bad is undertaken by good/bad people in huge city buildings. Business done internationally where UK vies for advantage with the rest of the global marketplace

2. How many earn "multi - million pound" bonuses ? How much of that do they pay in tax - 50%,60% ? Lets have more of them.

3. Vatican bank? German wheelbarrow logos? Pass on that one.

4. Not sure where you are going on UK banks taking over the Eurozone by lending them even 'more' money. Surely some mistake..

5. On good old days/12%/£304166.87 - I can only imagine that whatever you were taking was kicking in

Still on life support

I agree.

Moylando

The Prof suggested that the way out of our economic woes lay in finding strong and charismatic leaders.

I suggested that such people usually obtain power by rabble rousing.

The rabble is most easily roused by religion, nationalism and racism.

I backed this with the eminent historian's quote on the ill effects of power.

I showed the ill effects of rabble rousing and megalomania with reference to recent history (World War II).

World War II in Europe might not have occurred had the Vatican not been such an enthusiastic supporter of Fascism and Nazism.

In 1922 the Papacy and Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty in which each agreed to leave the other alone to perpetrate its crimes against humanity.

http://www.concordatwatc...78&kb_header_id=841

The similar deal with Nazi Germany is detailed here:

www.americamagazine.org/...icle.cfm?article_id=3131

www.emperors-clothes.com/vatican/cpix.htm

and in many other places.

Acton made his quotation in the context of the Papal claim to infallibility which was part of a long political process still ongoing.

My contention is that the best defence against a bad choice of leaders is education of the electors, especially in history.

This famous statement attributed to George Santayana has produced many paraphrases and variants:
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.
Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them..

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Santayana

To study the economic issue that was the starting point of this thread without an awareness of history, politics, psychology, sociology, geography and the interconnectedness of everything on Earth: is like studying navigation without an understanding of wind, currents, astronomy and doubtless much else.

All

A very good commentary on work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4ItCQ7fquY

Prof

The FT seems to agree with you over bank reform:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/...-a42b-00144feab49a.html

See also:
http://blogs.ft.com/west...ubborn-and-exasperating

We need emotions to give us the desire to live. But they then proceed to mess with our heads so we end up living badly. They are a bit like wine - a good servant but a bad master. Substitute prescription pain killers if alcohol offends any of your sensibilities :-;

Interesting comments from Mr Darling, although we all know that banker bashing sells papers and books.

He must have conveniently forgotten that prior to Lehman Brothers going out of business, he was actively encouraging banks to lend more, attempting to influence that Bank of England to pump additional funds into an over leveraged market and arguably prolonging the inflation stage of the UK housing bubble rather than trying to release the pressure. .

http://www.timesonline.c...ages/article4518306.ece

Still, helping people buy homes is good for votes, and politics must be very damaging for the memory, they all seem to forget things so quickly.