Matt Taibbi has important things to say about Mark Carney's appointment as Governor of the Bank of England:
Another Goldman Creature Given Vital Government Post
By Matt Taibbi - Rolling Stone
Big news yesterday in the United Kingdom, where the citizenry surveyed its domestic banking system and discovered that it couldn't find a single person trustworthy enough to put in the top job at the Bank of England. So they went to Canada and stole that country's central banker, Mark Carney, who just happens to be a former Goldman, Sachs executive – he was once Goldman's managing director of investment banking.
. . . .
But Mark Carney is no Elliott Ness, brought in from the outside to clean the streets of Chicago. Instead, he's another Geithner-esque character who will almost certainly prefer a hands-off regulatory approach, and seems to view the power of the government and the central bank as being necessary mainly to help bolster public confidence in the banking system. He'll likely be another central banker in the mold of Ben Bernanke, who's used endless rivers of cheap loans and money-printing programs like Quantitative Easing to keep floating corrupt banks all night long, for as long as they want to keep playing the roulette table. Here's the Guardian's prediction with regard to Carney:
He and many others in central bank circles know that most of the Britain's banks are very highly leveraged. That without the support of the Bank of England's quantitative easing programme, and its very low lending rates – all effectively backed by British taxpayers – Britain's banks would effectively be insolvent.What the banking system really needs is a guy who will step in and force bankers to go back to being boring, risk-averse drips who lend businesses money to buy new equipment or fleets of trucks or whatever. What we have instead are coked-up wannabe big shots straight out of Boiler Room who are washing Mexican drug money and laundering Middle Eastern cash and playing around with wild price-fixing schemes – pretty much everything you can think of that isn't quietly counting beans and helping grow the economy.
And so Carney will continue with quantitative easing – which has provided British banks with the liquidity needed to indulge in speculative activity both at home and abroad, speculative activity that bears a scary resemblance to that undertaken before the crisis.
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