Let me make it quiet clear, I am an ordinary member of the public, a housewife and OAP.The full extent of my knowledge of economics boils down to running a household budget.
I have been reading what people have been saying and am getting very angry with those that think that people like me are Bank Bashing. I am one of the thousands of people in this country who will ultimatly pay for what the banks did which started this dreadful state of affairs.
I strongly believe that we have to learn from the mistakes of the past in order to be able to move on.It is why I believe that the banks should never ever be allowed to regulate themselves, they cannot be trusted as Dave C notes.
Like millions of people in this country I watched those TV pictures of people quing outside Northern Rock and listened to Pestons breathless,triumphant, alarmist commentary and like many others, in the days ahead wondered if this would also hit our own bank or Building Society,how safe was our money, our life savings.
Like many I resolved to try and learn and understand as much as I could about the situation. What I learnt and heard in the weeks following, I found both disturbing and unbelievable.
I come from a generation that always believed bankers were scrupulous,honest and honourable people...what we all learnt is that that is far from the case.The same applies to other financial dealers,short sellers, ratings agencies etc etc.
I have no idea what percentage of money held in banks comes from ordinary people like me, proberbly a very small amount I suspect. But we do represent ulimatly a very large number of people, whos individul lives could be wrecked for ever by their mischief and wheeling and dealing. They have to clean up their act and they have to be regulated, if not for any other reason than to protect people like me.

@Tom Hagen, Buckskins, et al...
The drive towards ever greater deregulation, followed by both "conservative and "leftish" governments over the past thirty years has led us to this situation. I seriously doubt that there is anyone, barring a few lunatics and linguistics professors, who would advocate a return to any kind of Communism.
Socialism is not one all-embracing theory or dogma - that died with the DDR, and good riddance.
We have a situation where the economic orthodoxy of the past thirty years has predictably failed. The task for us now is to find a system that will combine the best of the Bretton Woods era with the maximum amount of liberty, accountability and social unity. This is by no means a simple task, and it will take more than one government to sort out the long term effects of this crash equitably.

They're using the same tactics as the US right: if you say it loud enough often enough the masses will believe. Thank God they can't get away with recruiting God in the same way.

The Adam Smith Institute are just as fanatical- and barmy- as the IEA.
They gave us the 'delights' of bus and train privatisation, now they're turning their attentions to the BBC.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/93617

(*2009 speech)

A steady state economy may be a solution to our global problems,but I am sure Mehdi Hasan would like us all to adopt global sharia banking.
see
http://steadystate.org/

Mehdi, you write:

'are they really the evidence-denying, bank-defending, free-market fanatics'

There is nothing wrong with defending banks, genenerally, as you seem to imply. To b be sure, the actions of certain substantive banks have caused massive problems, but they often provide a crucial liquidity in the national economy through borrowing. The leftist preoccupation with banker-baiting needs to stop as its reductive and reactionary - attributes I would usually use primarily to describe our friends on the right.

The audacity of the IEA to even suggest this in light of the way the banks and other financial
institutions behaved.
Now the right are trying to rewrite history.Long before this became a left or right thing and
within weeks of the crisis starting numerous news articles,TV programes etc,unpicked what had caused the crisis, all pointed to mischief within the various finacial organisations.Insufficient regulation had let that happen world wide, not just in the UK.They had been afforded respect and treated as honest and professional brokers...they were not,they need stict regulating so that ordinary hard working people never again have to suffer because of their lying cheating profit making

Tomhagen ''The leftist preoccupation with banker-baiting needs to stop as its reductive and reactionary ''-

Yes we should all just accepot the fact we have been well and truly shafted and move on like good compliant boys and girls.

john blams brown for what happend to the economy, so their fore he was the one who brought down the rest of the world what a load of rubbish, if the wrong person is accued it means that the guilty get away with it, like the short sellers, how do you account for the rest of the world following his ideas, and that includes the yanks

Dear god you have to wonder at the mindset of these people the bankers brought the world to its knees when is the right going to accept this simple fact?

@John Bracewell

The FSA was created partly because the Bank of England did not perform well in earlier bank crises. If regulation of the banks had been kept with the Bank of England, it's far from certain that the outcome would have been any different.

You also need to remember that the regulators 'failed' in the USA and elsewhere.

As for the banks being allowed to regulate themselves as the IEA suggests, when they attempted in Basel II, it proved to be ineffective (and Basel II was backed up by laws). Banks will always find ways of pushing at the boundaries whilst (generally) staying just within the law. Self-regulation won't work.

all bank small and big are back and i saved my dough by declaring myself insane under ealing council and refuse to go home where my family is being looked after many tax payers