Gee, it’s a good thing the governments rode to the rescue with billions of dollars in Corporate Welfare for the lying cheating fucktards who screwed everything up, no?
Otherwise, gosh, we would have had people not being able to buy bread, power shut off to everyone, riots in the streets …
No, we would have had the banks nationalized. Which is what should have happened in the first place.
But here with the 1-year anniversary of the collapse, we are having a ridiculous level of retroactive propagandizing BY the criminals who fucked everything up in the first place. The same people who STILL haven’t had any new regulations to control their activities, the same people who STILL haven’t faced any repercussions for nearly destroying the economy of the western world, are now expecting us to BELIEVE their bullshit about how they managed to dodge the bullet and keep us all from anarchy and starvation …
U.K. Faced ‘Bank Runs, Riots’ as RBS and HBOS Neared Collapse
This begs the question for me — why haven’t we had a run on the banks? Who in their right mind would continue keeping their money in banks? How stupid are people? Wait, I already know the answer to that.
“Hey, I know we almost destroyed the world economy, and took every dollar you owned with it, but hey, it’s all good now! Trust us!”
Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) — A year ago today, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and HBOS Plc were close to collapse, causing a chain reaction that could have ended with riots in U.K. cities, security analysts and economists said.Bank failures would have forced the government to cancel police leave and deploy troops as the breakdown of the financial payments system threatened the ability of utilities to provide essential services, said David Livingstone, a fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London, a former adviser to the government’s Cobra crisis response committee.
“You are talking about a situation with mass disorder and panic,” the former Royal Navy officer said in an interview. There would be “riots, pandemonium, everyone fending for themselves.”
Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King and Financial Services Authority Chairman Adair Turner met at 5 p.m. on Oct. 7, 2008, and readied a 250 billion-pound ($398 billion) rescue for the banks in the 16 hours before they opened for business the following day. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Bloomberg News one year on, the Treasury declined to say if it had a contingency plan for the two banks, then or now.
Releasing such information would probably “have a destabilizing effect on financial markets,” damage the government decision-making process and cause commercial harm to the banks involved, the Treasury said in a letter.
“In the current economic climate, economic perception, even if totally misconceived, is important and has the capacity to alter market behavior,” the government said. “To confirm or deny whether or not the information is held, either in relation to the banks mentioned in your request or more generally” would hurt the banks and the U.K.’s economic interests.
‘Catastrophic’ Costs
The crisis last year was the worst Britain had faced in peacetime, Darling told the British Broadcasting Corp. last month. The two banks were not “confident they could get to the end of the day,” on Oct. 7, King told the same program.
“You would have had unmitigated panic and a bank run,” said Tom Kirchmaier, a fellow at the London School of Economics. “People would not have been able to buy bread. The cost to the economy would have been catastrophic.”
RBS and HBOS, then in talks to be taken over by Lloyds TSB Group Plc, had more than 35 million business and individual customers with 475 billion pounds of deposits, 22 percent of the U.K. total, held at about 3,250 branches.
‘Contagious Effects’
“If RBS hadn’t been propped up as it was, in practice it would have been nationalized the following week,” former Bank of England deputy governor John Gieve said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “If RBS, HBOS, Lloyds had gone down, that would have had huge contagious effects throughout the rest of the world.”
The failure of Edinburgh-based RBS and HBOS would have had a domino-effect with customers seeking to take out their deposits from other lenders and causing a wider run on U.K. banks, said Vicky Redwood, an economist at Capital Economics Ltd.
“Trust in the banking system would have completely collapsed” and would have generated civil unrest, said Redwood. “People would have been rushing to take their money out of the other banks and you would have been heading back to the depression era.”