Thursday, 22 January 2009

Empire building

If I'm a tax payer, and the tax payer owns 70% of Royal Bank of Scotland, and Royal Bank of Scotland own thousands of bad mortgages in sub-prime America - does that mean that I own some bits of America?

How exciting.  We should be told.  Some of the properties might even have soil.

Maybe all the properties with stakes from RBS, Barclays, HBOS and all the rest in the US should be ordered hang a union jack - manufacturing said flags might be a useful economic stimulus for Mr Obama, though I don't suppose anyone can actually work out who owns what in this credit crunch mess.

Still it's quite fun - looks like the Boston Tea Party was a waste of time after all.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Saltire, surely, as it's RBOS

The Speaking Goat said...

No no no. The oil is Scottish - financial balls up - that's a UK thing.

Rebecca said...

The financial balls up is indeed a UK, or even global thing. But, hey, we can still be proud of our national contribution to world events - and amongst considerable competition for the title (World's Worst Banker www.newsweek.com/id/171688/page/1)

The Speaking Goat said...

That's an excellent link Rebecca - thanks.

I think we need some sort of corporate irresponsibility legislation so that guys like this can be brought to book. Corporate Manslaughter is helping companies to take their health and safety responsibilities seriously - but actually - Fred the Shred has inflicted far more misery on the world for years to come, than say a train crash that kills a couple of hundred people. (A strong statement and obviously just an opinion but I reckon it's easily true).

The stocks - that's what we need - good old medieval stocks. Sir Fred can tour the world to be bombarded by rotten tomatoes in every town.