Unanswerable questions from a new FT reader
(extended text, below)
From Mr Joe Rooney.
Sir, It was the wrong day for my wife to start reading the Financial Times. After some period of time she turned to me and said: “Why is George Osborne taking legal action against the EU cap on bankers’ bonuses when it says here that these chaps at ICAP were demanding bonuses in return for manipulating the Libor market?” All I could muster in response was that you would have to ask the chancellor himself to explain that.
A brief period ensued before she came back with: “If these three ICAP chaps are to be extradited to the US to face criminal charges and ICAP settled a civil investigation for £55m, then judging by this article that says JPMorgan are going to settle for $11bn I can only imagine that tens if not hundreds of their employees are facing similar criminal charges?” Somewhat exasperated I said I simply did not know.
After another pause she continued with another question: “Does it really need so many different regulatory agencies to deal with a single bank?” I could only reply that I had read somewhere that banks prefer to deal with lots of different regulatory agencies.
She was not finished, however. “Look,” she said, “in this article it says that New York gives Wall Street about $3bn a year in tax breaks and other incentives. All of this does not make any sense.”
I was about to tell her that she needed to go to business school to understand how free markets efficiently allocate scarce resources, but instead I picked up the sports section of my white paper and left the room quickly.
Joe Rooney, Brussels, Belgium
....
If such simple questions can't be answered with adequate tempo then, yes, the USA is a failing state too, not just the UK. None of us can simply sweep fundamental question under the sports page, or Madame LaGarde's rug. We owe simple, timely answers to our families, not to mention the 7th generation yet unborn. It's our national survival we're talking about.
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