Alistair Darling has announced that he is going to give the Bank of England the power to keep temporary emergency loans to banks secret.
The run on Northern Rock could have been avoided if the emergency credit line the Bank of England gave it had been kept secret. It was only because of the panic caused by mis-reporting the circumstances – it wasn’t a loan to begin with, it was the promise of a loan if it was needed – that Northern Rock ended up needing billions of pounds of public money to cover the gaping hole in their finances cause by people withdrawing their savings and the share price dropping through the floor as a result.
However, Darling hasn’t done his homework because this is against EU rules. It was an EU directive that forced the Bank of England to make the credit facility public. An EU directive that the previous Bank of England governer said he would have resigned over if it was enforced whilst he was governer.
Technorati Tags: Bank of England, Federal Europe, Northern Rock, Alistair Darling
Darling doesn’t seem very happy these days. They are fiddling whilst the credit crunch crunches on. They should be onto the banks to be more transparent. However, at Gordon’s little tea party yesterday there was no declaration that THEY would be transparent!
Alistar darling is a cock, pure and simple, a cock, we were gald up here when he went to Westminster away from edinburgh local stuff but he has not lost his magic touch of the turd kissing
I actually know the guy and he is an utter twat, he is one of the few people I knew who would make me go and drink in another pub, due to the sheer faecality of his personality and that of his circle jerking friends.
What a wanker he was, one of the few people i could say I actually despise.
Wonko, you give Darling too much credit! I might be wrong, but it seems to me as if he’s little more than a sockpuppet for the PM.
I reckon the Eurocrats would be more keen on this secret takeover thing than open crisis and state aid / public ownership, which might lead people to expect government to rein in the banks for ripping people off, etc.
The idea that the government could not act because it was against EU laws… Further proof that the EU is a nascent state – and not commented upon by the mainstream media, merely reported.
[…] has to fall on the EU because Saint Robert wouldn’t have found out about the credit line if it wasn’t for the EU Monetary Abuse Directive (MAD) that required the Bank of England to publicise the fact that it had been offered. The […]