Letters & opinions
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Guilty men
Ben Chu’s analysis of where culpability lies for the financial crisis (“Where are the guilty men?”, August) puts some of the responsibility on our political class, but not enough. The UK government and its central bank oversaw the debt and property bubble and have offered few explanations. The unwinding of the quantitative easing programme is still clouded by smoke and mirrors.
Decisions taken by the Treasury are worthy of further scrutiny, especially its approval of the takeover of National Westminster Bank by Royal Bank of Scotland in 1999. RBS integrated into its limited Scotland-based operations the complexities of a major (and systemically important) English clearing bank, which was much larger than the bank purchasing it.
As far as I know, Alistair Darling maintains that this acquisition remains an unalloyed success, and no link can be made between that takeover and the scale of RBS’s almighty implosion only eight years later.