Rescues without legislation.
The rescue scoreboard for banks outside the US:
* Dexia – Benelux – recapitalised
* Danish banks – new credit lines
* Hypo – Germany – credit guarantees
* Glitnir – Iceland – nationalised
* Irish banks – deposits guaranteed
* Fortis – Netherlands – partly nationalised
* Svyaz – Russia – nationalised
* Other Russian banks – new credit lines against foreign loans
* Bradford and Bingley – UK – mortgages nationalised, deposits and branches sold
What I can’t see anywhere is a request for new legislation to meet the emergency. Either all these governments and central banks have powers in place, or they are winging it. [Correction 2 October: Ireland is rushing through new legislation.] Even the Belgian government has acted decisively, and it doesn’t really exist.
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three.
I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.
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