“The Government is committed to improving standards of regulation and regulatory co-operation in our overseas territories and to implementing the European, G7 and other OECD initiatives to tackle unfair tax competition. We will not allow high-risk hedge fund speculation by a few to translate into wider risks for the many, and destabilise the financial system on which we all depend for prosperity.”
The above is a quote from Gordon Brown. Want to take a guess when he said it?
The answer is November 1998 – a decade before the financial crash.
If Brown had followed through on the promises made in this speech, the crash would not have happened, or at least not been as spectacular. The speech is still there in the Treasury archives, planning action on tax havens, better regulation, more transparency in banking, internationally agreed accountancy standards, reform of the IMF, an insolvency mechanism for countries, and new policies to contain and resolve financial crises before they become global.
None of those things happened, but they were the right things to do – that’s why they were all promised again by the G20 in 2009. There’s a simple reason why they weren’t done, and Gordon Brown admits it in an interview to be broadcast tonight, : “In the 1990s, the banks, they all came to us and said, ‘Look, we don’t want to be regulated, we want to be free of regulation.’ … The truth is that globally and nationally we should have been regulating them more.”
“I’ve learnt from that” the Prime Minister goes on to say. “And so we are tougher on the banks and tougher on the way they behave and we can be relied on to make sure the banks act in the national interest.”
If Gordon Brown knew exactly what to do ten years ago and didn’t do any of it, it rings a little hollow to be promising it again come election time.
The Earthbound Report 