It Happened On Brown's Watch

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2008

It Happened On Brown's Watch

The government's line is that entirely out of the blue we've been hit by a tsunami from across the Atlantic. It's an act of God (the American Mammon), and the"responsible" thing now is to throw up a mountain of public borrowing in the hope we can clamber above the waterline.

But despite the glowing international press Gordo initially got from "his" bank rescue plan, it's now becoming clear to everyone that Britain had become especially vulnerable to a tsunami. And the man primarily responsible for that is none other than Gordo himself.

There are two major charges (both blogged extensively on BOM):

1. His fiscal policy was far too lax, driven by reckless public spending and manifest in spiralling public debt


2. His financial market regulation was weak and shambolic to the point of gross irresponsibility

Yesterday the Prof posted an excellent blog picking up these points and spelling out Brown's culpability. Prof Buiter writes:

"The UK, under Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown became a lead player in the regulatory race to the bottom through which nations tried to poach financial service industry activity from competing national centres or to stop their own financial enterprises from relocating abroad...

Second... he switched to a relentlessly expansionary fiscal policy in New Labour’s second term... As a result the economy is faced, right at the onset of the recession, with an unsustainable structural fiscal deficit... 

He has left a ruinous legacy of financial instability and lack of fiscal restraint at home."

Let's look more closely at that regulatory issue, using some very helpful charts from the Bank of England's Financial Stability Report published today.

First, on Brown's watch, Britain's major banks hugely expanded their lending and other investments. Between 2001 and 2008 they tripled - tripled! And the biggest ingredient in this wobbling blancmange was not traditional bank lending with which the bankers were familiar, but securities investments which were something very new to them (at least, very new to their senior management):

Second, on Brown's watch, our major banks became far more highly leveraged - ie their ballooning loans and investments were supported by less and less equity. In 5 years, the typical UK bank went from leverage of about 20 times up to around 30 times - a huge increase. And the authorities even allowed one major bank to reach a leverage ratio of over 50 times - ie its always risky loans and investments were supported by less than a 2% equity cushion to cover against defaults:

Third, on Brown's watch, our major banks developed an unprecedented reliance on wholesale money market funding in preference to traditional deposits from customers. When he took over, customer loans were more or less entirely funded by customer deposits. But a huge funding gap has opened since then, and this year, the typical bank needs to fund 40% of its customer loans in the flighty frozen wholesale money markets. In the most extreme case (presumably the Crock), the funding gap is 80%+:

The Bank of Engalnd report contains a stack of other jaw-dropping material, but the point is made: it was on Gordon Brown's watch that our High Street banks went from being boringly tsunami-proof to being little more than baseless fabric, just waiting for a good puff of wind.

His half-baked regulatory system totally failed to manage the mounting risks, even though it was clear our banks were exposing themselves to positions far beyond anything they were used to. He was reckless not just with our public finances, but also our personal savings and the very bedrock of our financial system.

PS Has Tyler, under the pressure of events, turned into Will Hutton? He doesn't think so. Even free market zealots understand that banks must be regulated. Their core function is to take our cash on a promise of complete security and liquidity, and lend it out to borrowers who can offer neither. There's always going to be risk in that, which ultimately must be guaranteed by taxpayers (the consequences of not doing so having been demonstrated so vividly in 30s America). But in exchange for that guarantee, taxpayers have the absolute right to insist on regulatory safeguards, so as to ensure greedy bankers don't take the piss. Brown has singularly failed to enforce our right over the last decade, and we are now paying a huge price.

Heading for the dustbin of government projects

Amid all the financial disasters it's easy to forget the government's existing public spending disasters. But make no mistake - they're still there.

This morning brings news that the £12-20bn NHS Supercomputer - the National Programme for IT - has ground to a halt.

As you know, this grandiose folly - personally ordered by Tony Blair at a Number 10 summit against the wishes of many NHS clinicians, and the biggest civilian IT project in the history of the world - has been in serious trouble ever since we started BOM. Now, according to the e-health insider website:

“It has ground to a halt. And that is not just affecting deployments that should be happening now. It will have a knock-on effect on those that are meant to be going live two or three years down the line.”

Frances Blunden, the IT policy specialist at the NHS Confederation, the body that represents NHS Trusts, says: “It is a little bit too early to pronounce the programme dead.”
She said there were “undeniable” problems, but “to say everyone is walking away from it is a bit premature, probably”.

We've blogged this fiasco many many times (see here), so its collapse comes as no real surprise. But it is a chilling reminder of how blundering government overstretch can cost us billions.

And this was conceived before the new age of Keynesianism.