HBOS and the Evil Banker hypothesis

The banking witch trials resume today, and we are offered three new men to burn at the stake: Lord Stevenson, Sir James Crosby and Andy Hornby. The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards released its report at midnight (pdf), and it is as personally damning as any I’ve seen. It basically calls for them to be deemed not ‘fit and proper’ people. They are architects of a recipe for bank failure, taking on far more risk than they admitted, telling the regulator that their policies were cautious when they’d borrowed twice as much as RBS and then, even now, refusing to admit their guilt. It’s not so much a post-mortem examination as an 88-page J’accuse. I look at this in my Telegraph column today*.

Now, let’s say — for the sake of argument — that this trio is as vain, incompetent and reckless as Commission says. To me, this is not the main issue.