Is the Worst Over?

You really can do without a patronising person looking down their nose at you telling us we are all idiots. But on Radio Five Live this morning we got just that with Barbara Knight of th British Bankers Association (BBA), as she droned on like a very disinterested mimic of Margaret Thatcher.

She epitomises the attitude of the finance industry that has got us into this mess - the attitude of don't focus on the losses as they were 'extraordinary' (a word she used a lot) but to focus on the profit. She pointed us at sub-prime as being the root cause of the crisis when it is patently obvious that any one part of a high risk house of cards that is the financial system could have brought it down. She seems to think that had Governments not stepped in, many banks would have survived which is not true as the whole mess is so inter-related that each part affects another and even vice versa.

Meanwhile, a chap called Kaiser who presents a show called the Oracle, laughed at the stupidity of the way we have piled so much money, and more again yesterday, into a broken system when he believes we still have more bad news to come on debt write offs. In fact, he argued that far more of the bailout money should have gone on saving jobs which has been a theme of mine having seen how Germany and France and have directed their cash and are out of recession now.

The words of Brown saying how he always called the right shots look ever more deluded as we continue to pour money into a system that is happy to absorb it for its monumental and colossal losses. How we have let these bankers get away with it and how they can live with themselves in taking bonuses is beyond most decent people.

Finally, it seems that RBS executives are doing us some sort of favour by deferring their bonus as I predicted they would - until 2012. The question is, for what should we reward them when they have just got the taxpayer to write off a further £10bn of debt they no longer have to pay? And where is this mythical talent Knight says we should be paying top dollar for when the same priceless idiots lost so much in the last year? The whole finance industry needs a shot of cold reality.

We need a radical change at the top in this country as it is costing us our future.