Simon Jenkins is one of my favourite columnists. But I could not understand an article he wrote for the Guardian last week about the banking crisis, ending up:
I find it simply incredible that a chancellor can take over a trillion pounds of public money, some of it in secret, without giving a remotely plausible account [...]
Banks
Mervyn King put it much more eloquently than I could in a speech in Edinburgh today (pdf download from here):
The sheer scale of support to the banking sector is breathtaking. In the UK, in the form of direct or guaranteed loans and equity investment, it is not far short of a trillion (that is, one [...]
The Qatar/Barclays news this morning seems an appropriate moment to ask where we are on bank reform. First a brief recap on Qatar. Stage 1 of the banking crisis in the UK was the run on Northern Rock in September 2007. That led to gradually increasing worries about other UK banks. Meanwhile, Bear Stearns, a [...]
Amateurs approach the recent UK bank results at their peril. They are full of confusing complications. I last wrote about Lloyds in March when we got more detail about the government Asset Protection Scheme (APS), under which it was proposing to ensure Lloyds against 90% of its losses on £260 billion of risky assets. [...]
[Bufo Americanus, photographed in Deep Creek Lake State Park, courtesy of Aneta Kaluzna]
The evolutionary tree developed by Darwin’s successors is an elaborate structure. The standard semi-professional work is the Five Kingdoms by Margulis and Schwartz, although this will no doubt be succeeded in due course by a web reference. It gives the five kingdoms as [...]
