On the 19th June 2013, the Governor of the BoE, Sir Mervyn King in his Mansion House speech confirmed that the bankers must have been prosecuted under the exiting law and regulations. He said that the "firms that pose a risk to taxpayers [i.e. the financial institutions], cannot be prosecuted because of their systemic importance" (sic) and are "too big to fail, too big to jail" (sic) (at 18:38 of the Bloomberg recording). I.e. he clearly implied - and from the Governor of the BoE it is as direct statement as it can conceivably be made - that the bankers would have normally been prosecuted under the existing laws, but the structural arrangements which defy the spirit and the letter of the existing law seemingly preclude this. And this cannot be accepted: such reasons are clearly against the public interest and undermine the public trust in the justice system. Is it the case that there are small people that can be easily prosecuted and there are those who can conspicuously break the law, make themselves fabulously rich, bankrupt the country, turn lives of millions into complete misery and do all that with impunity accepted by the government? This appeared to be a message of Sir Mervyn about the government handling of the financial mess.
The founding article of this blog, "The largest heist in history", proposed over four years ago:
"In a normal free market economy a business that fails should be allowed to collapse. If a business is a giant pyramid scheme, like the current financial system, it must be allowed to collapse and its executives and operators should face prosecution. After all running pyramid schemes is illegal." Sir Mervyn: at long last, welcome to the club!
Therefore is the government going to move forward and start prosecuting those who caused the current financial mess? Legally there is no problem to do so: creating financial pyramids is a very serious crime. Bankers committed very serious crimes, which - from technical standpoint - were very trivial (and it is even more trivial to prove this). This has been discussed on this blog since early 2009. Or maybe Sir Mervyn was talking nonsense?
It would be helpful if the government made a public statement on Sir Mervyn's comments. They were definitely not lighthearted jokes.
When the author of this blog started talking about the prosecution of those who caused the current crisis more than four years ago it was considered by the mainstream as eccentric and not worth an attention. Now the "Old Lady of Threadneedle Street" sings the same tune. Or one might try to generalise and say that, sadly, there is nothing ridiculous that can be said now about the current state of world affairs that after sometime turns up to be glaringly obvious.
It is also encouraging that the mainstream starts slowly catching up with something that has been glaringly obvious for more than four years ago. Although the mainstream media journalists have still a long way to go: but they will eventually get there kicking and screaming. They are also as part of the financial mess story as bankers and politicians, not just reporting on it.
