Tuesday 24 March 2009

Those government guarantees really do work

Since the government's credit guarantee scheme (CGS) was launched last year, it has become the primary source of long term funding for UK banks. As the latest Bank of England quarterly bulletin puts it "nearly all senior debt issued by UK banks since the previous (BoE) Bulletin made use of the UK Credit Guarantee Scheme".

Where we are heading? Billions of pounds of government guarantees are being used to prop up a failed financial system. What is the exit strategy from this unprecedented fiscal support?

Exit strategy? There isn't one.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The dead hand of government intervention....

Anonymous said...

What would banks do without HMG? Go bankrupt?

Anonymous said...

Yes of course, instead of the G'ment guaranteeing the banks debt, we should just let all the banks fail! Yay! Bang goes the entire economy. Mmmm, I love the stone age, me!

Or we could just, you know, move on to nationalizing them, and when the recession's over, selling them back to the private sector in chunks, and never let them get so big again.