The FSA and a New Jerusalem
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Events recently confused me even more than usual. I’m not thinking about the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Magrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, on compassionate grounds.
That’s a cut and dry case - you either believe that the Scots are very compassionate, or that the price of oil has just gone up.
No, I was puzzled by the meeting between Gordon the Compassionate and Binyamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and also by the radicalisation of Lord Adair ‘Tobin’ Turner as expressed in his interview with Prospect magazine.
First, the meeting between Gordon Brown and Netanyahu where the agenda was focused on the continued construction of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. What was the purpose of the meeting was it to persuade the Israelis to stop building these illegal settlements on, for example, the hills surrounding Ramallah?
I’d like to think so but I can’t help wondering if our PM was looking for a tip or two on how the Israelis keep on building in these troubled times. After all, his vision of three million new homes by 2020 looks about as realisable as China’s Great Leap Forward.
No doubt Netanyahu could have come up with some useful pointers.
“Scrap your Land Registry Gordon”, might have been his first tip of the day.
“We scrapped the one you introduced in Palestine when it was a British protectorate. That way you can acquire land and start building with a clean slate and no land rights issues.”
Tip two might have been on time and motion studies issues. “But if people start protesting, send in the bulldozers Gordon. “That way you scatter the opposition and start building at the same time.”
“And another thing Gordon, you made the mistake of building on flood plains while we always build on hills. It’s not about intimidation or security – we still remember all the problems Noah had with the Flood.”
Whatever the outcome of that meeting it didn’t make headline news. What did – at least in the serious papers – was Lord Adair Turner’s pronouncement from on high (he obviously doesn’t suffer from vertigo) that some City activity is “socially useless”.
The chairman of the Financial Services Authority also believes that his organisation should no longer view the City’s “competitiveness” as a “major aim”, or lobby for its interests. Moreover, in his view the financial services sector is disproportionate to other sectors of the economy.
No doubt they’re popping the champagne in New York, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Tokyo and why not, they have a friend in Turner the Downsizer.
On the other hand, and here is the source of my confusion, could Sir Turner really be our own not so secret weapon and the only man who sees the situation as it actually is?
After all, who else knows what the optimum size of the UK financial services sector should be, or what is socially useless, or believe that the Tobin tax on every transaction is the right way to end excessive City bonuses?
Back in the 1980s Branislaw Kaminski, a Polish economist who should not be confused by the Russian nationalist leader of the same name who sided with the Nazis in World War II, maintained that communism wasn’t a good idea implemented badly but a thoroughly bad idea implemented surprisingly well.
With Turner in charge of financial regulation, let’s hope that capitalism doesn’t prove to be just the opposite.
Source:
Lending Strategy
