Greenspan's confession

The financial crisis has happened at the worse time in the political calendar for the people of this country. While politicians and the media are vexing themselves about who's going to cut what and by how much after the coming General Election, it diverts the peoples attention away from, in my opinion, the most important debating point, ie:- who's going to stop the bankers doing it again?

Neither Gord, Dave or Nick have mentioned it as far as I can see. All three of them are running scared of the bankers. Well I ain't!

I know I'm a nobody from nowhere, but I will not let this moment go by without trying to get the debate on to the real issue of the day, namely, how can we stop the greedy bankers doing it all over again?

I watched with interest and growing anger a recording of last weeks BBC documentary The Love of Money.

The most telling comment came from the man who was culpable to a large degree for the whole thing, and in some respects was the architect of the frame work that invited this kind of disaster.

Alan Greenspan the retired chief of the Federal Reserve, the US equivalent of the Bank of England in the UK, was interviewed about his involvement in the run up to the collapse last year. He was asked for his considered opinion on what happened and why.

One of his comments stood out above them all. He said, "There will be another disaster and there always will be, it's human nature and you can't change that".

I agree with him. But this very same man who says, “It's human nature to be a greedy, lying and thieving son of *****”. Who when asked to put controls and tighter regulations on the derivatives market back in the nineties, refused. Presumably he thought human nature would self regulate.

He displayed what many of the bankers are showing us right now, arrogance and a complete lack of contrition for his part in the financial collapse.

He has obviously changed his mind or not, who knows. The point is if he had heeded the warnings he was given about these bundled investments and the way they were marketed. He could have put regulation in place to keep an eye on what was happening. It may have saved the world from this mess we're in.

Now what the people of the world should be screaming for is a tighter regulation of the banks and the financial markets. The bankers won’t like it, but who cares what they think? They were, and still are, totally motivated by self interest and greed (this is the human nature Greenspan referred to).

Even after the tax payers of the world have saved their skins, they want to continue to give themselves massive pay, bonuses and pensions. While the rest of the economy contracts and people loose their jobs and businesses, these arrogant modern day robber Barons want to ignore, what we the people have done for them, and continue as if nothing happened.

Well I say enough is enough. If we can’t change human nature (and we can’t) then regulation is the only answer. This is what every Government of the world should be seeking to implement.

Otherwise the suffering that we are going to endure by way of unemployment and cuts to public services will be for nothing. And we will, as Greenspan said, “see it all again”, in the not too distant future probably.