Expert economic opinion is defining the Northern Rock debacle as immensely serious for the UK, and intelligent commentary describes the debacle as one defining Gordon Browns’ competence.
Here are a selection of these opinions:
- Jeff Randall, in Friday’s Daily Telegraph leader article, Gordon Brown will be defined by Northern Rock. Here are a couple of the choice bits from Jeff’s article:
“The Rock was wrecked by a banking version of the San Andreas Fault, but the Government’s ignorance of marketplace geology made matters much worse.”
“Brown is fundamentally clueless about commerce. He doesn’t understand free markets.”
- Willem Buiter in his Financial TimesBlog entry, “Where the Bank of England went wrong, and how to avoid a recurrence”, in which he said,
“The UK deposit insurance scheme is a shambles.” and concluded, “The Treasury should cut Northern Rock loose forthwith and not extend any financial largesse to potential private sector suitors.”
Trying to look back at last Friday’s Newsnight programme to review the content of a firecracker exchange between the excellent Willem Buiter and execrable Will Hutton, what do find but a pesky statement that it can’t be replayed because of copyright reasons. I wonder why? It’s darned irritating, because I wanted to quote the differences between Buiter and Hutton, the first arguing for Northern Rock administration, and the other arguing for nationalisation.
Ah well, I’ll have to settle for these two commentators. But what I want to know is, and in these questions I’m in full agreement with John Redwood, HERE.
- How much money has been lent to Northern Rock?
- How is it being funded, from which account?
- Have the Government set a limit on the taxpayers’ funding?
- How much of the taxpayers’ money is asset backed?
- How are we going to get our money back, and over what time period?
- What are the potential losses of the Government’s lending to Northern Rock
I’m going to be coming back to this subject during the coming weeks, because there is government incompetance to highlight, and it’s illuminating of the differences between Conseravtive and Labour.
