Every so often our bankers are caught with their trousers down and their naked backsides on grisly public display. We are tempted to seize the opportunity to give them a good kicking, but hell – they know where we live (until they repossess our home). What a bummer.
In the past we’ve seen our banks brought low by dodgy loans to South American governments, institutionalised money laundering, rogue traders and most recently sub-prime mortgages.
The sleight of hand which has taken this latest chunk of risk and spread it like mycelium throughout the world’s financial system is impressive, but right now all banks assume that every other bank is in the same mess as they are, so – impasse. No-one’s lending to anyone and as far as liquidity is concerned they’ve gone from snake oil to embalming fluid in a matter of weeks.
In good times (ie between banking meltdowns) our financial services companies treat punters with contempt and you only have to watch commercial TV for an evening to see this. Advertising for financial products in the UK starts from the premise that the product range is sufficiently complicated to rule out the possibility of just telling us about them.
So, adopting and adapting David Ogilvy’s insight that “when you've got nothing to say, sing it”, they hit us with 30-second commercials featuring crooning bank tellers, cartoon newlyweds or half-baked comedy sketches.
They must see our chain of reasoning as something like “Hey, these people can really sing – let’s give them all our money to look after.”
My own bank, some years ago, closed my branch down during a multi-zillion pound TV campaign focusing entirely on how they weren‘t closing any branches down. Oh how we laughed.
I kept my account with them of course since chutzpah of this quality only shows up infrequently.
However, we don’t need banks to make us laugh or gnash our teeth – we’ve already got politicians for that. From our banks we prefer clarity, although we’re never going to get it.
And yet, despite it all, complex financial instruments and products are here to stay. Lots of smart and rapacious people depend on this and, although they screw up badly now and again, the industry would go nowhere if we didn’t let them test the envelope.
So, as we consider just how far up shit creek these people have hauled the rest of us we should resist the temptation to kick ass, but we’ll certainly remember that, when we use the term “merchant banker”, it has a secondary meaning.
As rhyming slang.
