Posted by seumasach on October 18, 2008
Jean Shaoul
WSWS
18 October 2008
Within days of announcing an unprecedented £37 billion bailout of three high street lenders—the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Lloyds TSB and HBOS—that will involve the British government taking shares in the banks, Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling has caved in to the City’s demands for the banks to make dividend payouts.
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Posted by seumasach on October 16, 2008
Oct. 16, 2008 (LPAC)–The trillion dollar bail-out of British banks just implemented by Prime Minister Gordon Brown is already unravelling on the derivatives issue, which are now being questioned in the British House of Commons.
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Posted by seumasach on October 16, 2008
Something very strange and worrying is going on in money markets.
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Posted by seumasach on October 13, 2008
Alistair Darling pledged that RBS and the merged Lloyds-HBOS would be run at arm’s length from the government and ministers would not be involved in day to day decisions.
”The reason we are doing this is not because we want to run banks,” the chancellor told the BBC Today programme. ”The reason we are doing it is because this is the only way, when markets are not open to certain banks, they can get the capitalisation they need, this is the government’s only intervention here.”
Whilst the guardian lefties and the the BBC’s Robert Peston hail this “nationalisation”, the FT can be relied on to give the city’s brutal verdict. The only surprise for us is that the government is taking some preference shares, but this, along with the dividend restrictions, only really serves to guarantee that the share issue, which the Treasury is underwriting fails completely. The government therefore ends up paying billions for a whole load of shares which it could have simply taken for nothing.
The government has done enough to start a run on the pound and bankrupt the taxpayer, but this is a drop in the ocean of banking debt.
Peter Hall Larsen
FT
13th October, 2008
Some of Britain’s largest banks are to scrap dividends as part of a government plan to inject £37bn into three of the country’s biggest lenders.
Under the terms of the bailout, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and HBOS will be prevented from paying dividends on ordinary shares until they have repaid in full a total of £9bn in preference shares they are issuing to the government. Barclays, which is hoping to avoid government support by raising around £6.6bn from private investors, has scrapped its final dividend for 2008 in a move designed to save £2bn.
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Posted by seumasach on October 12, 2008
Lown Turner
10th October, 2008
SO where are you going to get your £16,000 from, then? That’s how much critics of Alistair Darling’s £250bn bank bail-out say it’s going to cost each of us.
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Posted by seumasach on October 12, 2008
Cailean Bochanan
12th October, 2008
The reason all the deception and hype about the government’s midweek intitiative is now becoming clear: it wasn’t just about fooling the British public but was aimed at a wider audience. Brown wished this bailout plan to be the model which the wider world will follow as collapsing markets lead,he will be hoping, to panic and loss of judgement. The government has just announced they will be taking major stakes in the main banks, which is odd because that was meant to be what last Wednesday’s announcement was about. Are the falling markets simply forcing the government’s hand? -after all,the banks and the government were keen to avoid a government stake but now there is even talk of full nationalisation. Or is this just further deception providing cover for those who may wish to impose similar plans on other economies?
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Posted by seumasach on October 11, 2008
Cailean Bochanan
11th October, 2008
The confusion that reigns concerning the nature of the British government’s intervention last Wednesday has reached staggering proportions. The study of Alisdair Darling’s statement leaves no doubt that there is a vast gulf between the proposal’s themselves and the way in which they have been presented. Last Sunday David Cameron had invoked the Swedish intervention in 1992 and set the ball rolling for the partial nationalisation thesis. This was very obliging coming from the so-called opposition and set in train an awesome “perception management” operation from the masters of these black arts ever since Walsingham’s Elizabethan police state had the bright idea of using the players, the stage itself, as a vehicle for official ideology. “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” and if people can be made to think that giving away £500 bullion plus to private interests is part nationalisation then all the better. This propaganda onslaught saw many seemingly unlikely figures chiming in at suitable moments to confirm the story-line, and doing so all the more effectively under the guise of attacking it.
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Posted by seumasach on October 10, 2008
City gang pulls off £500 billion heist.
Cailean Bochanan
10th October, 2008
After Wednesday’s dramatic events I dreamt that that was the headline in the Sun newspaper. But it was a dream; just that.
I awoke to the nightmare: The Sun, of course, had joined the rest in the great chorus of approval for Champagne Gordon, toast of the city. And an impressive chorus it was, including some onetime mavericks and black sheep who had returned to the fold just in time and were now singing with even greater gusto than more longstanding stalwarts such as the chairman of the Bank of England or the leader of the Tory party. There, was former scourge of anglo-saxon finance, Will Hutton; there, George Galloway purring with admiration now former colleague Alisdair Darling has finally decided to deliver (or, rather, stand and deliver) even if it was “too little, too late.” There too were the brand new party leaders, like Nick Clegg with his freshly-tamed financial spokesman, Vince Cable. All were there of the great and the good and they were singing off the same hymn sheet that great puritan hymn, “To be a Pilgrim”. These were the words, which in a transport of bitterness I imagined them to intone to that august melody. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by smeddum on October 2, 2008
Bailout Bedlam: Robbing the Taxpayers to Save the Banks
by Ellen Brown
Global Research, October 2, 2008
“Doesn’t this seem like lunacy to you? The consequences of it are unbelievably bad in terms of public intrusion into the private sector. Is anybody thinking there? It’s too late, it’s not going to make any difference, and it’s aggravating as hell when there’s a better idea and you can’t even get it in play.” Former Treasury Secretary John O’Neill in an October 1 interview with Bloomberg on the bank bailout plan Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by smeddum on October 1, 2008
Senate Move to Vote on Bailout is Unconstitutional Forward Liberally
Various media outlets are reporting that Majority Leader Harry Reid plans to call a vote on the Wall Street Bailout Plan tomorrow night. This would be a clear violation of the United States Constitution. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: bailout protest, stop the bailout | 5 Comments »
Posted by seumasach on October 1, 2008
The politicians in Washington and their slimy Wall Street friends have switched the Wall Street Welfare bill to the Senate where only a third can be voted out in November. The corrupt filth in DC thumb their nose at the people again. Okay, here’s some things we can do. IT’S IMPORTANT WE DO THIS NOW! This is not a conservative thing or a liberal thing its a WE THE PEOPLE THING!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: bailout protest, stop the bailout | 1 Comment »
In These New Times 