Catherine Bennett
Thursday September 20, 2007
original content from The Guardian

With eruptions of collective feeling over this or that currently so commonplace, perhaps it was to be expected that the failures of Northern Rock would unleash, in some quarters, yet another torrent of emotion. There is, after all, much proud regionalism at stake, and is not the collapse of a once-mighty bank, in its way, a kind of bereavement? In the north-east, where queues were the first to disappear, Northern Rock claimed that 80% of callers were expressing loyalty, alongside Wallsend Boys Club, local rugby players, Sir Bobby Robson (who pledged to open an online account), and James Rambotham, chief executive of the North East Chamber of Commerce, who declared, “Northern Rock is very special to the hearts of people in the north east”.

Margaret Fay, chairwoman of the local development agency, also assured Northern Rock chief executive and local hero Alan Applegarth and his board of directors that she felt their pain. “I’ve spoken with the chairman, Matt Ridley,” she told a local paper, “to assure him of our support at this difficult time.” Following his subsequent, unexplained disappearance from the public scene, along with fellow Geordie Derek Wanless (chairman of NR’s risk committee), Fay might want to arrange a minute’s silence, or at least, some yellow ribbon, with which loyal customers can festoon local branches, proclaiming both their hopes for the missing pair’s safe return, and their indifference to Lord Wanless’s doomed adventures in the City’s answer to Blaydon Races: the asset-backed commercial paper market.

That is, if they can find any local branches. They may have to make do with trees. Only four years ago Northern Rock axed 20 of its 94 branches (and 180 jobs), most of them in the north-east, prompting large numbers of local investors to switch their accounts to other banks. In a newspaper article headed Hearts of Stone, it was reported that Applegarth was even closing an iconic outlet in Alnwick - home to Harry Potter tourism and, more recently, the Duke of Northumberland’s lottery-funded garden enterprise. A pitiless Applegarth explained that the relevant branches were not generating enough money for his company, which needed to improve “cost efficiency”. A spokesman for the finance union Unifi described the closures as “further proof that it is no longer a community bank but a fully fledged public limited company”.

If it is too early to ask if the surge of “emotional support” Applegarth now identifies in the north-east could be, in any way, linked with the late Princess of Wales, it would be good to have the diagnosis of Sir Callum McCarthy, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, who recently expressed irritation with queueing Northern Rock depositors: “It would now be irrational to worry about your deposit following the guarantee.” He considered they were “acting strangely”. But which is stranger, in these circumstances: to proclaim undying loyalty to a Geordie buccaneer, much criticised for short-changing savers; or to decide that the buccaneer - and the people such as McCarthy, who were meant to keep an eye on him - are entirely unworthy custodians of your life savings?

Of course there is nothing singular about McCarthy’s fabulously patronising attitude towards Applegarth’s worried little people. Foremost among the famously relaxed financial regulations operating in this country is the rule that, when things go wrong with a financial product, customers should invariably be blamed for their naivete. Why were struggling borrowers so greedy for Northern Rock’s 125% products? Don’t they know what the free market does to overreachers? Except this week, when it didn’t. Why didn’t its indignant savers appreciate that free market capitalism - from which they benefit so richly! - is based on risk? Except, as this week, when the Bank of England intervenes, and it isn’t. So what business do they have copying the professionals, and trying to move their money somewhere else at short notice? What would it take to reassure them? “It is difficult,” McCarthy pronounced, “to legislate on questions of confidence.”

And it can only, surely, become more so. For every calm and trusting Northern Rock investor, who does just what McCarthy tells her, there will be another who has attempted - without, alas, the requisite background in economics - to understand the causes of the run on Northern Rock, and then become upset by the discovery that, even as the potential of the American credit squeeze to destabilise that company must have been obvious to financial analysts, some of them were still commending its “core business model” - and its shares - in newspaper reports such as “Jitters on Rock look Overdone” (June 28), and “Northern Rock Solid” (June 30).

Even if the experts were all agreed, just a few weeks later, that Northern Rock was guilty of catastrophic recklessness, there remains plenty to confound and worry the ignorant, from the influence of Wanless (when he reappears) and the merits of low, as opposed to high interest rates, to the wisdom of saving bighearted Geordie chancers from the consequences of their own greed. Wasn’t Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, right, last week, to talk about “moral hazard”? Or should we believe Alan Greenspan, disciple of Ayn Rand, adviser to Gordon Brown, and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, when he says morality does not come into it? “You cannot calibrate liquidity to rescue only the deserving.” Though he could easily be wrong: this patron saint of scumbags has confessed he failed to foresee the sub-prime mortgage debacle.

Someone, plainly, is acting strangely. But whether it is consumers, Northern Rock, the Wallsend Boys Club, the government, Mervyn King, the Federal Reserve or the FSA, it is not for the irrational and financially illiterate to say.

· This week Catherine read around half of Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence: “The most boring, unsympathetic autobiography I have ever read. Which will, I’m sure, be taken as a compliment by a man who liked nothing better, in his youth, than settling down with a copy of Copper Ore Deposits in Chile.” She saw Impressionists by the Sea at the Royal Academy: “Bracing.”

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