Já agora deixo a fonte original desse desbocar, que esse "Mailonline" é mais WAGs e bolos... e já agora comem três vezes!
Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester, The Times January 24, 2009 Escreveu:
No more cream for fat cats, says the bank bailout boss Lord Myners
Lord Myners' office in the Treasury is directly above the Cabinet War Room — where Churchill directed his campaign against Hitler. “Sometimes I think I should be working from down there,” says the City Minister. For weeks, the man responsible for Britain's banks has been surviving on sandwiches, working over weekends and sometimes all night as he masterminds operations against a different kind of enemy — the credit crunch.
Since he joined the Government from the City in October, Lord Myners has helped to devise two bank rescue packages in the worst recession for 60 years. The former chairman of Marks & Spencer, banker for N. M. Rothschild and hedge fund manager admits that he has been “quite busy” but says: “It's not more stressful than the City. I am a technocrat. I work in detail and I have found the adjustment to government pretty easy.” The Prime Minister and the Chancellor “make the big decisions”, he says. His role is to identify the problems and say: “These are the solutions.”
This week the Government announced an insurance scheme to cover the banks' toxic assets, but it failed to calm the markets. Lord Myners admits that he does not know the scale of the bad debt or the cost to the taxpayer. “There are very, very substantial impaired assets in British banks. We would expect requests to insure significant pools of assets... We are trying to achieve closure; we are trying to say there is a basis on which banks can say it will get no worse than this.”
It will, he says, take four to six weeks to work out the details. “If we get it wrong and we charge too much, the banks will say they are not interested and continue to carry the risk and continue to be in the mire of past errors. If we don't charge enough, they will flood us with assets and we will end up putting public funds at risk to a greater extent than professional analysis would justify.”
There could, the minister admits, be more bailouts to come. “There may well be. Who knows? It depends how we negotiate these things.”
Nationalisation is not the solution, he says. “I always say you can never rule anything out, but I believe that strong independent commercial banks are the best way to manage the division of credit in our economy.”
However, he insists that the Government will do “whatever is necessary” to shore up the banks. “Doing too much is less risky than doing too little.”
Lord Myners tells us that within days of his appointment he looked into the abyss. “How close were we to a systemic collapse of the banking system? We were very close on Friday, October 10. There were two or three hours when things felt very bad, nervous and fragile. Major depositors were trying to withdraw — and willing to pay penalties for early withdrawal — from a number of large banks. The steadying influence of what we did should not be underestimated.” The whole system, he says, is like a house of cards. “It would have been Bank A today, Bank B tomorrow, Bank C the next, all the way down.”
The Government, he says, has a duty to intervene. “This is an industry which is underwritten by society. The question is how does society get an appropriate premium for its risk?”
The bankers must, he warns, learn from their past mistakes. “Banking should be a simple industry: if you have surplus money, you can place it with safety; and if you want to borrow money you should be able to borrow it on sensible terms. But banks developed sophisticated risk management instruments... and that began to develop a life of its own. We will see a reversion back to simpler banking forms. The older, basic banking business my mother would have understood will be seen as sound.” His main worry now is that banks have gone from a period of “excessive exuberance” to one of “reckless caution”. They are “are at the shallow end of the pool, clinging on to the rail. We want to get them out into the deeper water. If they don't go there, the fear they have is crystallised by their own actions. Failing to support British business and householders is going to create a downward spiral.”
With repossessions and unemployment rising, there is a growing sense that the Government is no longer the master of events. “The Government is very much in control,” the minister insists.
“We have acknowledged that it is going to be a difficult year. This is a global phenomenon.” But as sterling falls, Britain is starting to look worse-placed than other countries. “I wouldn't speculate on why the currency is doing what it is,” he says. “Economies turn. On a particularly dark and cold night the sun does come up the next day. We have had recessions before — I am old enough to remember several of them. This is a particularly unusual one, so it makes it challenging.”
When we ask whether there are any signs of recovery yet, his press officer shouts: “They are talking about green shoots,” and the minister says: “I won't make any predictions.” Speculation that Britain, like Iceland. could have to declare itself bankrupt is ridiculous, in his view. “The banks were on some thinnish ice but that's not the same as economic bankruptcy.”
The Government still has the option of quantitative easing — printing money in layman's terms — if the situation does not improve. “That's an issue primarily for the Monetary Policy Committee. We've created in the new £50billion fund the architecture which could be used.”
With bank shares going through the floor, surely the Financial Services Authority's decision to lift the ban on short-selling was misguided? “I don't think there is a lot of shorting out there,” says the former hedge fund manager.
Lord Myners is now surrounded by bankers with teams from Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse working alongside Treasury officials on the rescue packages. Isn't it wrong that the people who got the country into this mess are being paid to sort it out? “A lot of people are offering us free advice and, where we have negotiated fees, we have driven a pretty hard bargain.”
The Government, he says, is not just pouring out more cream for the fat cats.
“We are not bailing out the bankers. What we have done is to ensure the banks are there to support the economy. There are going to have to be some fundamental changes in the way the banks operate ... the golden days of huge bonuses in the investment banking arms are gone.”
Although he does not want to “demonise” the bankers, he does believe that those at the top were earning too much. “There is a need to look at the whole approach to compensation. To me it seems hugely challengeable that those at the top of our corporations — not just our banks — have seen their remuneration grow exponentially over the past 20 years. Perceived fairness is very important.”
Bank boards must, in his view, be much tougher on senior executives.
“I've met more masters of the Universe than I would like to, people who were grossly over-rewarded and didn't recognise that. Some of that is pretty unpalatable. They are people who have no sense of the broader society around them . . . I think there is quite a lot of annoyance and much of that is justified. Let us be quite clear: there has been mismanagement of our banks.”
Should anyone be prosecuted? “If they have committed criminal offences yes, but I don't think you can say I so abhor what you've done that I'm to prosecute you.”
Should any of the fat cats pay back their bonuses or lose knighthoods? “That's a decision for individuals.”
In the City, Lord Myners says that he practised what he now preaches. “I have always been focused on value for money,” he says. “I get my suits from Marks & Spencer. We always take a quiet holiday in Cornwall in the summer. I grew up there, it's my home.”
As a child, he was adopted from an orphanage in Bath by a Cornish couple. “My father was a fisherman and a small shopkeeper. I was fortunate that I had a good education.”
His character was, he believes, formed by his background. “People have said I've got a bad temper, which I don't think is true, but I'm a very driven person. I have had the great good fortune in life to do many things and now I'm doing this.”
Life and times
Born April 1, 1948
Education Truro School; Institute of Education, University of London Current job Financial Services Secretary to the Treasury
Career His first job was as a teacher in London, then, in 1972, he joined The Daily Telegraph as a financial journalist. He went to work for NM Rothschild & Sons merchant bank and, in 1985, he moved to Gartmore, a pension fund manager, becoming chairman in 1987. From 2002 to 2006 he was chairman of Marks & Spencer. He was also chairman of Guardian Media Group and Land Securities. He joined the Government in October. He has held directorships with Bank of New York, Imro, Bridgepoint, Coutts, Lloyd’s Market Board, NatWest, O2 and Orange, and chaired the Tate and the Low Pay Commission
Family He is married to Alison, who is chairwoman of the Contemporary Art Society. He has four daughters and a son
Enviado: 22/3/2009 13:11
