April 07, 2010

Financial Times, if you do believe in small state and open markets, you are certainly not showing it.

Sir in your editorial of April 7, “The UK must look beyond the crisis” you state with some hubris “The Financial Times stands for a small state social justice and open markets”. Sincerely, if that’s so, you’re not showing it.

Current Basel regulations require a bank to have 8 percent in capital when lending to a small business or an entrepreneur but if lending to a government of a sovereign rated AAA to AA- the banks needs zero equity, and this with any lens used is a clear expression of an immense bias in favour of the state.

On November 18, 2004 you published a letter I wrote that said “We wonder how many Basel propositions it will take before they start realizing the damage they are doing by favoring so much bank lending to the public sector. In some developing countries, access to credit for the private sector is all but gone, and the banks are up to the hilt in public credits.”

But since that, and after almost some 100 letters more on the same issue; and after you must have seen sufficient evidence of how banks all over the world, and especially in Europe, loaded up on public debt, not once have I seen express your disgust over something that most clearly goes against “a small state and open markets”.