Bob Diamond, ex CEO of Barclays, feared New Labour aimed to nationalise that bank!

There was much mealy mouthed testimony and pointless hand-wringing and platitudes over wrongdoing in the Barclays' trading room,  by Bob Diamond, before the Treasury Select Committee in the House of Commons this afternoon!

The main point of substance that came over to me was the fear at senior levels within the bank, that New Labour's dreadful set of ministers at HM Treasury and within Downing Street, were aiming for yet more bank nationalisations thus adding substance to the complaints raised by Elizabeth Beckett in her letter to the Master of the Rolls at that time, linked here, of which the following is the pertinent section 12:

I write now, in view of the danger, after the attempt of Michael Foot to nationalise banks, now being effected under the same intention, but with the camouflage of a world economic crisis, to ask your Lordship to declare the automatic assent void and illegal under the constitutional statute including that of 1795 made perpetual in 1807, 1817 and 1848 and only repealed under the automatic assent, Rogers and Walters claim the assent by convention had become automatic since Queen Anne was the last monarch to send a Bill back. In fact, William III, George III, William IV, Queen Victoria and, as Asquith well knew, Edward VII (because the Bill had been handed to him), had all returned Bills.

An American set to blow Britain's Establishment apart on Independence Day?

There is no doubt that the appearance of the former CEO of Barclays Bank before the Commons Treasury Committee this afternoon at 2pm London Time, will provide the biggest firework of this 4th July this side of the Atlantic. The Telegraph article stating that the blame will initially be passed to the Bank of England's P.W. Tucker is here.

At the end of this post I have pasted another posting from this blog showing that the moves in Libor and their significance were fully publicly known and their impact debtated.

This blog did not mainly concentrate on the Libor aspect of the unravelling of our financial system underway at that time of course. It also full tracked the dishonest, and more probably, the criminal activities of those Labour leaders in power at the time and their honours and wealth hungry professional mandarins. Some postings on that aspect are sometimes available from the archives of this blog. Some of the more significant ones that are not, I will try to paste from time to time this morning on this blog, with a twitter link, but without further comment.

It would be truly ironic, would it not, if the Labour Government loosening of extradition restrictions to the USA allowed us to eventually witness leading former New Labour Party ex-Ministers and others of their henchman and manipulators being carted off to the USA for US Federal criminal financial crimes and eventually serving time behind bars, where they so fully deserve to be?

Here is the other referenced posting from this blog on Libor in January 2008, others on that particular topic are among yesterday's postings:

Friday, January 11, 2008
LIBOR jitters and small businesses fears
Reuters reports jumps in the one and three month Libor interest rates signalling more financial storms ahead for sterling, read here. Meantime the pound crashes to a new record low against the euro at 75 pence following weak manafacturing figures although such activity now only accounts for 15 per cent of this once mighty industrial economy. Small businessmen are surely right to be demanding their promised referendum on the EU Treaty, a report on that is linked here.

How Barclays once tried to trouser my cash!

Nothing much surprises me about Britain's bigger banks. I moved my account from NatWest to Barclays after the former paid my salary cheque into somebody else's account for three months running, without notification until threats were issued when I consequently became overdrawn, and a subsequent refusal to remove the charges they therefore imposed nor any attempt to issue sufficient apology for the inconvenience caused. That was in the late nineteen-sixties when my particular Barclays experience began.

I gave up on Britain for the second time in the late nineteen-eighties, when my current account was still with Barclays.  For the British business I had started up in the interim, I chose to bank with Lloyds, comment enough  on my long Barclays experience. Paperwork involved in changing regular payments, like thousands others I suspect, had kept me with that bank.

As the years overseas passed by, my use of this UK current account dwindled, thus without notification Barclays closed the account. In 2002 my daughter was to attend a British University, in expectation of her needing funds and opening her own account I transferred a largish sum, sufficient for accomodation expenses and all the usual undergraduate purchase that would be necessary, to my Barclays account, fortunately from a UK branch of HSBC.  When I presented myself at the Barclays branch of the University town concerned, to draw that cash as I believed I had arranged, I was told they had neither record of my account nor of the funds transfer.

Eventually as I had happily made such transfer through a UK bank, I recouped the potential loss of those not inconsiderable funds, I was too dejected and defeated to pursue the struggle for the lossed balance on the closed account. Nor did I have the time or energy to pursue the matter with the supposed UK banking regulators, why waste one's energy when such possibly dishonest inconsistencies seemed to be becoming the norm.

So am I surprised at the news of Barclay's manipulation of Libor and the apparent unwillingness of the UK police or criminal prosecutors to get involved? Not at all!

What does surprise me is this aspect, which the UK media seems to have so far  to have left unreported or commented upon: Libor (as explained by a regulator interviewed on TV in this case,) has input from sixteen London based banks, interest rates paid are submitted and the higher four and lower four are dropped before averaging the other eight to set the index interest rate level. It appears for any manipulation to be effective at least five banks would need to be involved, which banks, therefore, are the others involved with Barclays.

Treasures from the Threads - Number Seven

On a Rachel Sylvester column titled, 'Alistair Darling won't walk the plank alone', comes this: 'Northern Rock Nationalisation and Barclays bank surprise increased dividend' - discuss: Has no one else noticed the connection between the Government buying Northern Rock with £110 billion of taxpayers' money and Barclays bank today doleing out upped dividends? Was it not Barclays, back end of last year, which was rumoured to be all but bankrupt? Where did it suddenly, in the space of a couple of months, get all that cash? Their balance sheet has suddenly swollen by a minimum of £10 billion. Is it not the case that Northern Rock has been used by the UK governmnent to channel taxpayers' money to the big banks? Does this not the raise the question, just who does the UK government work for? And for whose benefit are people taxed? Northern Rock raised approximately 60% of all its money from loans from banks, the rest from savers accounts with them. It went bust because it could no longer pay back the rising interest on these bank loans. All of a sudden the UK Government steps in with £25 billion of tax money. Who do you think that money went to, straight away? Why did Barclays, Citibank and others suddenly go from flat-out insolvent basket-cases to flush 'loadsamoney' entities in the same time frame as the Northern Rock debacle? Work it out peeps. You've been had - big time, to the tune of £25 billion, and that's just for starters! And please, don't blame Laurel and Hardy(Brown&Darling). These clowns are just doing as they're told by the moneychangers. They were told: "We're broke, give us taxpayers money to bail us out, but don't finger us. Find some vehicle(NRock) to hide the public money bailout of us major, private banks. And any heat from this, you take the rap - after all that's why we pay you clowns so much for sod all - to be our frontmen." You've been had peeps - the bankers who run your sorryass country have just had their massive losses socialized, i.e. paid off by you. But they kept all the good-time profits private right? Off-shore, away from the UK taxman, in the Caymans and so on. And this is just the beginning. The Rock still owes approximately 60% of £110 billion = £66 billion minus the £25 billion already paid, so around min. £40 billion plus interest at say 7% to the big private banks. This will be coughed up forthwith from the UK taxpayers again. Look out for more amazing, 'surprise' dividend hikes from the other big banks, all courtesy of the UK taxpayer! What a wonderful world it is - the average little-guy PAYE taxpayer, bailing out and subsidizing non-domicile, non UK taxpaying zillionaires. Oh, but wait, the UK taxpayer gets a bargain after all. For circa £70 billion doled out to the über-rich the taxpayer gets £110 billion worth of NRock mortgages. Bargain, right?At a conservative estimate of 10% drop in house prices year on year over the next 3-5 years, this £110 billion notional book-value, will after careful calculation of mine be worth precisely, wait for it, SQUAT. Nada, zilch, go whistle for it! BOY HAVE YOU BEEN HAD - to the tune of £110,000,000,000! Posted by pj kelly on February 19, 2008 12:26 PM