Max Hastings
Daily Mail
Three years ago this week, the collapse of the American investment bank Lehman Brothers signalled the onset of the global financial crisis, which has since escalated into a sovereign debt nightmare, boiling around us still.
In response to the financial services industry’s manic greed and incompetence, the British Government last year established the Independent Commission on Banking.
On Monday, the commission published its final report, calling for Britain’s banks to be broken up, ring-fencing their retail arms from the investment ‘gambling’ operations.
So far so good. But then the rocket fizzles out abruptly: reform need not be implemented for eight years. Some of us will be dead, for God’s sake, before anything happens.
