Don't Bank On It

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Image © NTT Data -



 If you're not currently listening to this season's weekly Reith Lectures on the BBC, I would suggest catching up with them on BBC Sounds. Former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney offers us not only the inside view of the mechanics and machinations of world banking, but also a dispassionate sideways view of the ethics and morality that should underpin their actions and business methods, but have so often failed to heed in their times of plenty. Greed, hubris and complacency are the bedfellows, ultimately, of failure.

He talks about the primary lesson that needs to be learned from both the aftermath of the 2008 crash and the current global pandemic: the need for humility and long-term planning by the banking fraternity for the future security of the world economy and the people who both it and the banks themselves serve. Humility, a quality of attitude: vocation opposing the arc of careerism; planning of fundamental importance in the breaking of the ten-year cycle of boom and bust that short-termism continues to generate: the under-damped economic feedback loop that oscillates between reckless risk-taking at the peak of the cycle and over-weaning fiscal rectitude at its nadir; rarely settling for any length of time at a comfortable point of stasis. To achieve stability requires not only rules, but the following of those rules, not just to the letter but in spirit also.

Covid has proved the resilience and elasticity of resources that the world's national banks and the regulatory systems that seek to control them, actually have. The wherewithal is there given a sufficient collective will and need. Less individual freedom in the upper echelons of our financial systems is required to make this happen. We need mavericks and free-thinkers to oil the workings of commerce: just don't give them the keys to the vault. It shouldn't take a global crisis to run things as they should be run: the economy is everyones, not just the elite at the hub of the system; who are after all, merely its custodians in the service of the peoples of the world. Humility. Propriety. Planning. There's a three-word slogan that you won't hear uttered by the current Prime Minister any time soon.

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