Tonight:
5°c
Do we want our banks to fail? Having been through the trauma of the past 18-plus months we can all answer that one.
By the same token, however, how well do we want them to succeed? We struggle to come to terms with the scale of the profits they make (just in the same way that when they were critically holed we could not grasp the magnitude of the losses of Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS).
Again, there is an argument that says Britain does not have many world-beating corporations left so we should champion Barclays and HSBC and take pride in their performance. But it also sticks in the common craw that they seem to triumph too easily. Certainly, they deserve congratulation for having pursued a more careful strategy than RBS and HBOS. In Barclays' case, too, the deal to snap up Lehman in the US was a clever piece of business. They say they've managed it without the help of us, the taxpayer.
That isn't true: they were able to avail themselves of the Special Liquidity Scheme, set up by the Bank of England to allow them to temporarily swap assets that were difficult to trade, such as mortgage-backed securities, for loans, in order to get funds flowing again, when it appeared as though the banking system was locked and heading for catastrophic meltdown.
Plus, they were able to continue as they did safe in the knowledge that if disaster befell them, the Treasury would always step in, as it did with RBS and HBOS. With governments having driven down the cost of capital, their ability to use that cheap capital to fuel their myriad activities and to make a positive return is hardly tantamount to rocket science.
Yet, what accompanies their stonking profits is talk of the staff bonuses they're going to pay. The impression this creates is of banks that only care about themselves, that exist purely for the benefit of their employees and shareholders. What there isn't is any sign of humility, of genuine concern for others and gratitude for the fortunate position they're in. There's never any tangible sign of them acting on the front foot, of volunteering to give money back and structuring their remuneration packages in such a way that their workers do not receive payouts for simply doing their jobs.
Instead, we're left with a deeply divided society, with a select, ever richer, few on one side and the rest of us on the other. Until the banks recognise they can't go on like this, there is little scope for change - any government interference, including the sort proposed by Lord Myners, the City minister, at the weekend is bound to be imperfect and unlikely to make any significant difference.
They will say they operate in a global marketplace and any handicapping of their behaviour, freely or otherwise, will damage their ability to perform and in turn that will undermine Britain's economic position as a leader in financial services - as well as costing jobs that will harm the pensions of those people whose retirements are invested in their shares.
There is no obvious solution. We want our banks to win, of course we do. But they need to take on board our feelings. They need to say "thank you" and show they mean it.
