Very interesting piece of news on on Paul Mason's blog posting that I wasn't aware of. Perhaps he will have more to say on this on Newsnight tonight. Says in 2005 Tony Blair was pressing the FSA to reduce their regulatory role even more than they had already done. Extraordinary that such high level pressure was being placed to make a lax regime even slacker.
As it happens, there was a radio interview on the bank bail outs with the very same Lord Turner on Radio 4 this morning:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7844000/7844151.stm
Peston is most insistent that complete nationalisation of the banks isn't on the cards (at least at this point in time):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/01/insurance_not_nationalisation.html
'Shortly after Labour's 2005 election win I was summoned to a speech by Tony Blair, hosted by the IPPR. It was entitled Risk and the State and naturally induced as much anticipation as a crown green bowling telethon. However, halfway through I realised Blair had said something that sounded calculatedly outrageous: that the Financial Services Authority was "seen as hugely inhibiting of efficient business by perfectly respectable companies that have never defrauded anyone". The implication was that finance was over-regulated, the FSA over-heavy...This is the same FSA that has, implicitly, been drubbed by its new boss, Adair Turner, for its failure to adequately monitor the financial system as it careered out of control in the first half of this decade. At the time, the then boss of the FSA wrote a furious letter to Blair, accusing him of undermining the FSA's role. Had not the FSA been at the forefront of the drive for light-touch regulation in Europe, McCarthy complained, and now it was being dissed as heavy handed. We don't know how the spat ended because Tony Blair's reply to this letter has been suppressed under the Freedom of Information laws. What we do know is that the FSA was under political pressure from the Labour government to be even more hands-off than it already was.'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2009/01/shortly_after_labours_2005_ele.html
As it happens, there was a radio interview on the bank bail outs with the very same Lord Turner on Radio 4 this morning:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7844000/7844151.stm
Peston is most insistent that complete nationalisation of the banks isn't on the cards (at least at this point in time):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/01/insurance_not_nationalisation.html