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  Brian - there are two issues here - the misbehavior of the banks and the financial crisis. These are actually two separate issues though each impacts adversely on the other making the overall problem worse.
  
  There is no doubt that the banks did wrong. But - it was the regulatory changes imposed in 1997 by Brown that allowed them the leeway to do what they did as far as the UK is concerned. The weakness in the banking system was exposed by the cyclical slowdown that started in 2007 which was when the system started to come apart culminating in the 2008 banking crash. Mrs T said that the banks were 'not ordinary businesses' something Brown forgot when he introduced the tri-partied regulatory system that got rid of clear lines of prudential responsibility and oversight.
  
  The banking crash made the cyclical slowdown worse of course but what turned it into a crisis was the appalling position the UK and many other countries were in to cope with it. It is this for which governments can and should be held responsible. Their massive spending splurge during the growth phase of the economy created massive deficits and high debt at exactly the wrong point in the economic cycle. This was made even worse in the Eurozone by the Euro straitjacket preventing the weaker economies from using devaluation as part of their strategy. This awful situation is also compounded in the UK by what some economist journalists described as a Fantasy Island economy in which most of the growth from 2000 was built on an unsustainable bubble of private debt. This latter problem was again caused by the 1997 reforms in which debt was left out of the Bank of England inflation brief resulting in the interest rates being kept too low for too long and the discouragement of saving by the Brown government.
  
  As you can see there are clear lines of responsibility here.
  
  Reg prefers to ignore much of these when he refers to, I quote:
  ""Bankers and finance johnnies caused the world`s financial problem."" As you can see he simply turns a blind eye to what does not fit in with his hatred of the wealthy and those of us who do not think we should all kow-tow to all that is demanded by governments.

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