Bankers lose the plot (From St Helens Star)

Remembering the days when bankers were pillars of society

8:53am Thursday 5th July 2012 in Letters By Reader letter

I REMEMBER a time when workers doffed their caps to those pillars of society: the local family GP, the vicar and of course the local banker.

In those bygone days he knew most of his customers by first name and was considered a valuable member of the community especially to his local businesses where he offered sound advice.

You would have thought after the debacle of the banking collapse of 2008, they would have learned their lesson.

But no they just said thanks very much and carried on fleecing the very public who had saved them, firstly with mis-selling mostly worthless personal protection insurance, for which we have had to pay billions in compensation as we now own 80% of some of these banks.

Now they have bankrupted many businesseses by lending them money with complex terms linked to interest rates.

If that was not enough we find they were even fixing the daily interest rate which banks use to lend to each other where even a decimal point can earn those in the know millions in commission.

Meanwhile the poor customers was paying far more than they should.

Some of these were large corporates who use this money to invest in the future of their companies. It took the American regulators to discover this and even now the FBI are looking at over 20 large banks worldwide, while as usual our authorities sat on their hands.

It gets better... we now find that because of Labour’s de-regulation our banking industry, the serious fraud office cannot get involved, even though these people have bankrupted the nation to the tune of untold billions of your money.

If you defraud the benefit system of a few thousand pounds you are named and shamed and on top of a fine, made to repay your ill-gotten gains.

It’s time these bankers had their collars felt and if we cannot do it let’s hope the Americans can apply for extradition of these unsavoury characters, where the sentence really does fit the crime.

But Cameron cannot allow this to be kicked into the long grass, with the promise of action tomorrow, never today.

Harry Bradbury, Loughrigg Avenue, St Helens.