| If you want to borrow money, it seems you have to to jump through hoops and then leap over a bar higher than that the guy who won the Olympic high jump gold cleared.
More than 400,000 people have had mortgage applications turned down in the past year due to the credit crunch – and that doesn’t include those who don’t get to the application stage or tried to take out a smaller loan or credit card because they failed to clear the bar.
And, say banking statistics, that is after they have had their three attempts to clear the bar.
That 400,000 are the tip of the iceberg, just like the declared losses all the greedy robber barons at the banks are due to declare.
I have no sympathy. The banks are the architects of their own misfortune – and that of millions of innocent others – through sheer greed.
Those TV ads Lloyds Bank are running about trust show just how a bank considers the man in the street.
Trust is a two-way relationship built up over a period of time between two parties who bear no malice to each other and would go out of their way to help the other.
When has a bank ever shown that sort of trust to anyone?
Their motive is skimming a profit of the backs of other people’s hard work. Why should I trust them? Whatever have they done for me, except extract their pound of flesh in return for borrowing a pittance.
The fact is they follow each other like sheep. None make independent decisions and the way all have shut up shop at the same time for borrowers reeks of a cartel.
They harrumph and say they have to protect the interests of shareholders but the truth is the banks have ruined the economy and made life a misery for millions for years to come who can’t borrow for business or to move house.
The government deserves some stick for all this as well. It’s OK to stand back and let the money markets sort themselves out and take all the glory for the good times, but whose looking after your interests?
Lack of direction and regulation from the government to attract money in to the City of London has played a part in all this.
You and I are caught in a pincer movement, with the banks on one side squeezing credit and the government on the other picking over the bones of what’s left after inflation for yet more taxes.
Someone once said all the world’s problems were down to religion. He was half right. – they are really down to religion and money. |
