I AGREE with Bishop Ken Good in the News Letter (October 9), that the global financial instability, affecting tens of millions of people on this planet, the majority being hard-working, law-abiding citizens earning their crust of bread, is not wholly the fault of the bankers, but most certainly they are in the front line when apportioning blame.
Politicians are elected, particularly in the countries purporting to be a democracy, by the electorate in the hopeful belief that the people they have chosen will pass legislation accordingly in 'every' sphere, health, education, finance, etc, for th
e betterment of society.
This present global financial crisis has exposed their abysmal failure in two different ways: firstly, they have failed to protect Joe Bloggs with his few quid in the bank, which in most cases has been hard-earned; secondly, they have failed to prevent, with cast-iron adequate legislation, laws to prohibit financial speculators in exploiting any weakness of the global financial system.
One now asks: where did all these billions/trillions of wealth go, into cyberspace? Somehow I cannot swallow that hypothesis as a valid reason.
The big-time financial investors' money will be in safe-keeping. They have the financial knowledge to deal with such emergencies (and/or with political allegiance?), to weather the storm, unlike Joe Bloggs with his few thousand in the bank who doesn't have such knowledge. One sneeze and they are penniless.
Now we come to the reality of the situation, again with Joe Bloggs being the inevitable loser, if the global politicians, particularly in the USA, didn't take the necessary action, followed by others in the western world, to arrest and/or minimise this unholy mess with Joe Bloggs' money, poor Joe would have been a hell of a lot worse off.
The politicians in every country know the high-ranking, non-producing, financial speculators, who have created this disaster for humanity. They should and must be identified, brought before the court and charged with endangering the financial equilibrium of the country they reside in.
When convicted, they should have their assets frozen, and then Joe Bloggs will have at least the satisfaction that it was not only him that had to pay the price of a mess created by politicians for the want of proper legislation, so that disasters like this will never be repeated.
Harry Stephenson
Kircubbin
The full article contains 400 words and appears in n/a newspaper.
