If underwriting the banks was the problem, Mervyn, why are we
still doing it? – Telegraph Blogs  Saturday 30 August 2014 |
Blog Feed | All feeds  Daniel Hannan    Mervyn King's diagnosis
is right, but he is prescribing the medicine that sickened the
patient   When talking to Leftie friends, I’m struck by how
often they assume that, as a conservative, I must have supported
the bank bail-outs. Their logic seems to be that, because all
Tories are “on the side of the rich”, we must be in favour of
bank bonuses, underwritten, if necessary, by the state.  In
fact, of course, such scant opposition as there was to
subsidising the banks came from the free-market Right. It was
morally and economically inexcusable for taxpayers to pick up
the bad debts of some extremely wealthy men. Quite apart from
the general arguments against nationalisation and state grants,
there was clearly a perverse incentive in encouraging bankers to
take bigger risks, secure in the knowledge that they would be
cushioned from the consequences i