From Scotland News: Cashing in on state-owned banking

Alf Young • http://www.scotsman.com • November 24, 2012

AS THE debate over reform continues, one answer is to keep financial institutions in the public sector, writes Alf Young

Disturbing splits are emerging at the top of the Bank of England over how to reform our battered, post-crash banking system to ensure it doesn’t blow up again. In testimony this week to the parliamentary commission on banking standards, the Bank’s departing governor, Sir Mervyn King, called yet again for a more radical division of retail and investment banking actitivies than that envisaged by the Vickers Commission…

…A Los Angeles-based attorney, Ms Brown is the author of Web of Debt and president of the Public Banking Institute (PBI). Banking, she argues, is not a market good or service. It’s a vital part of societal infrastructure which properly belongs in the public sector. And by taking it back where it belongs, states could regain control of that very large slice (up to 40 per cent) of every public budget that currently goes on interest charged to finance investment programmes through the private sector. Deficit reduction could get an enormous boost, by cutting out the profit-driven middle man.

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