When the going gets tough, banks yelp for nanny
By Jeff Randall
Last Updated: 8:16am GMT 26/03/2008
Bank customer: "What's the difference between a recession and a depression?"
Bank manager: "In a recession, you lose your job. In a depression, I lose mine."
Remarkable, isn't it, just how quickly champions of laissez-faire solutions can become advocates for state intervention. All it takes is for their gravy-train to break down.
When freedom to play with barely any restrictions was making them rich beyond imagination, big-shot financiers applauded "light-touch" regulation. The looser the rules, the louder they cheered.
Now, however, as credit is crunched, losses mount and prospects for lucrative employment come under threat, many titans of unfettered enterprise are suddenly crying out for nanny.
Not for them the tough love of supply and demand. No, sir. These are desperate times, requiring generous measures of tender, loving care.
The essential plumbing of commerce, it is alleged, has become dysfunctional. Or, as Josef Ackerman, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, said: "I no longer believe in the market's self-healing power."
Why ever not? Nowhere on the tin does it say that markets will correct themselves without someone being hurt. Indeed, for markets to function properly, pain, somewhere along the chain, is inevitable.
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Markets work because they create winners and losers, not jobs-for-life security. Financial Darwinism doesn't just underpin the survival of the fittest, it ensures the extinction of pea-brained dinosaurs.........
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/03/26/ccjeff126.xml