The Banking System

Watched "Britain's Banks : Too Big To Save?" last night with an open mouth. It's available on the iPlayer until 25th Jan, its a shocking insight into the greed of the few, that without regulating, risk another banking crash, worse than the one that caused the global recession.

Incidently, at the start of the recession - after the run on Northern Rock, the failure of Lehman Brothers and the government bail out, I found myself at a friends drinks party talking to a couple of bankers. After a lengthy and lively discussion, I pointed out to them that they were probably (understatement) "public enemy No. 1" for the state of the economy. The reaction was shocking. "The general public are to blame, for getting mortgages without the means to repay them".

Anyway, watch this "Britain's Banks : Too Big To Save?" on the iPlayer here.

"It's more than two years since the giant banks were bailed out with billions of pounds of tax-payers' money, yet little has been done to reform or regulate these vast institutions. The BBC's business editor Robert Peston looks at how the international regulators, a little-known and secretive committee that sits in the Swiss city of Basel, have consistently failed to curb the excesses of the giant banks and how new proposals fall short of the root-and-branch reform promised after the crash.

With the fate of Ireland, brought to its knees by the excesses of its banking industry, fresh in our minds, Peston asks whether Britain would be in any position to bail out our huge banks should there be another crisis. Are the banks, once thought to be too big to fail, now actually too big to save?

The film contains the first interviews with the government's new Banking Commission, as well as contributions from Business Secretary Vince Cable, new RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton and the Bank of England"