More decisive action by the British government.
The British government (according to the London Times) has increased the funding for bank recapitalisation by another £25 billion. The Bank of England has raised the core capital ratio for banks from 6% to 9%. The London stock exchange may stay closed until the bank recapitalisations are done deals. Several bank CEOs are expected to go.
After their expensive dithering over Northern Rock, the British financial authorities are now showing Nelsonian dash and ruthlessness.
Memo from Nelson to Secretary Paulson and EU finance ministers co-signed by the Thane of Cawdor, John Paul Jones, the Vicomte de Turenne, J.P. Morgan, and General George Patton:
If it were done when ’tis done, then t’were well
It were done quickly.
Update – Sunday 2330h CET
The other EU countries now have committed themselves to large-scale bailout packages on the British model: equity capital (i.e. partial nationalisation), and guarantees for interbank loans. There’s not to be a European fund so pressures will mount on the weakest national banking systems. The laggards at the semi-failed Friday G7 meeting must have been the USA or Japan.
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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