Ah, how good it has been to see amongst the torn wreckage of England’s World Cup aspirations that our financial institutions have been celebrating the return of good times.
Markets, though they tend to fluctuate with every bubble of oil through the gulf’s surface, have generally been on the up but banking is so attractive that we have some enthusiastic although inexperienced chaps (in the age range 60-70) wanting to start a new one.
I say inexperienced merely because some of them have never run, or worked in, a senior job at a retail bank. Almost in the same news bulletin we heard that overdraft customers are being charged hundreds of % in interest whilst their luckier, richer mates get next to nothing on deposits.
We rather thought that the global crisis had been largely attributed to the mistakes of our city friends so it’s very cheering to hear that whilst the rest of us brace for spending cuts on top of recession, they are likely to be revisiting the good times.
Put simply – they caused it, we paid for it; now they’re the only group not suffering the consequences. In need of assistance from my own Barclays Personal Banker I gave him a call last week, only to be met by a recorded message telling me he was away on sabbatical for the next year. To be honest it didn’t feel all that personal.
