Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Beeboid Baffled: Govt Refuses To Investigate Fantasy Screw-Ups

Liberals claim to be outraged! at the bank bailouts, but it always seems to be the ones that got away that really hack them off.

Take Beeboid Robert Preston and his attempts to explain how RBS's implosion means Barclays's management should be up for a public flogging.

Yep, you haven't missed something, his argument really is that stupid: if Barclays hadn't dropped out of the bidding for ABN, they might have paid too much for it, and that might have run down their cash reserves, if they hadn't been offering mainly shares instead of cash.

Nevertheless, in a stunning rebuttal to all that talk of 'liberal fascism', Preston still thinks a private business should be called to account for doing what it didn't actually do in the first place:
However the FSA has neither the time nor the powers to extract the relevant testimony from Barclays. So we won't get it.
But how about that Balen Report anyway? Any chance of extracting testimony about that? Especially since, unlike Barclays, the BBC really does take billions of pounds of public money.

Note too how the multiple layers of fact checking managed to leave out the bit about Barclays offering shares instead of cash in his first post - and note the typically classless way Preston acknowledges the libel, doubtless after a call from m'learned friends:
PS. Barclays (no surprise here) is keen for me to point out that the value of its offer for ABN was significantly lower than that made by the RBS consortium. And Barclays was mainly offering shares, rather than precious cash. So its board behaved less recklessly than RBS's.

But Barclays does not dispute that it should probably say a little prayer of thanks more-or-less every waking minute that it did not end up as the owner of ABN.
So, his report was perfectly accurate, except for the factual bits. It's the unique way they're funded, y'know....

3 comments:

moriarty said...

Peston really does have his head stuck up his arse in that article -The destruction of wealth - that of investors, including more-or-less anyone saving for a pension - has been savage, running to tens of billions of pounds in each case. - There was some moody Scottish guy who raided pension funds for billions some years ago, I don't recall the Beeb using the word 'savage' about that.

(And Peston needs to look up 'bowdlerised' in the dictionary too.)

JuliaM said...

"There was some moody Scottish guy who raided pension funds for billions some years ago, I don't recall the Beeb using the word 'savage' about that. "

As far as the Beeb are concerned, Brown is now the Forgotten Man...

JuliaM said...

"It's the unique way they're funded, y'know...."

Clearly, helping themselves to our cash becomes a bit of a habit and some like to take that further...