Putting the RDR into perspective

Events over the last three weeks in global financial services have been mind-boggling. Never in post-war history have we experienced anything like this.

To get a clearer picture, the money the government has pumped in to saving retail banks – with the full support of the Conservative Opposition – has been many times what it took to carry out the post-war nationalisation programme (including inflation), which was vigorously opposed by Churchill.

This monumental, epoch-making experience, which will re-write economic history, has seen the nationalisation or part-nationalisation of the UK banking sector becoming not only the model on which the euro-zone and the European Central Bank are basing their emergency regulatory policy, but the one that Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, and President George Bush, are now recommending to the US Congress.

If any political or social event was to be the one that refutes the juvenile suggestion that history has ended, this is it.

In fact, these events will change the way banks are regulated and managed for the next century or so.

We are living history. So much so that it makes the retail distribution review pale in insignificance.