MAIL COMMENT: A study in greed and recklessness

For future students evaluating the great crash of 2008, the story of HBOS and Lloyds TSB  -  the hare and the tortoise  -  will make instructive reading.

For years, Lloyds has been criticised for its unspectacular profits as it adopted a cautious approach to lending money.

In stark contrast HBOS, run by a young marketing whizkid with little banking experience, recklessly exploited the financial markets to take ever more risks, in a headlong rush to become Britain's biggest mortgage provider.

This week, Lloyds, the tortoise, which played long and safe, saved the hare and, in the process, became Britain's biggest bank.

How sickening then, especially for the thousands of HBOS staff facing redundancy, that its chief executive Andy Hornby keeps his multi-million-pound job and gold-plated pension pot.

As this paper has frequently commented, one of the more distasteful aspects of modern finance has been the way those who have run great companies into the ground walk away with such huge rewards.

Another of our concerns has been shorting  -  in which speculators make obscene profits by 'betting' on the falling share price of vulnerable companies, thus accelerating their decline.

It is exactly this shorting that has caused huge firms on both sides of the Atlantic to crash so dramatically in the past few days.

While shorting can be a factor in ensuring efficient free markets, the Government is right to have introduced a temporary suspension of such practices.

The danger now is that the world is panicking itself into an even worse economic situation.

With no one prepared to extend credit, and investment banks collapsing, financial paralysis could take hold, in which companies cannot borrow money to operate and people cannot get mortgages to buy homes or credit to buy cars.

Last night there was some cheer, with the disclosure that the U.S. government is setting up a rescue fund to take over the bad assets clogging up the banking system.

Now, more than ever, is a time for calm and co-operation between the world's financiers, leaders and regulators.

A clean start?

NHS staff were yesterday praised by Gordon Brown for a 'dramatic fall' in MRSA superbug infections.

To this, the Mail adds our own congratulations.

No newspaper has been more ferocious in attacking the scandal of disgusting, filthy hospital wards, and the loss of countless lives to MRSA through a lack of simple, basic hygiene.

So it is only fair we recognise the hard work that has reduced the overall number of cases by 57 per cent, meeting a target set by Ministers back in 2004.

But a note of caution: big reductions in some trusts mask the fact that, elsewhere, infection rates are actually getting worse.

There can be no complacency, either. The New Labour years are littered with targets which  -  once met  -  were abandoned, allowing the problem to return more virulently than before. What an unforgivable, fatal mistake that would be.

Garbled wisdom

The Mail never thought it would feel nostalgic for John Prescott, who returned to the airwaves yesterday to appeal for calm in Labour's leadership squabbles.

The words were mangled, the syntax tortured and the sentences back to front.

But in five wondrously muddled minutes, there was at least one clear message: 'Disunity kills.'

The pygmies plotting Mr Brown's demise should take heed.