They couldn't forsee the credit crunch? How much are these guys paid? It's been written all over the markets for several years that this was coming, and commented upon at length on websites such as prudentbear.com and not a few arguments I've been in on usenet.

The idea that this was some sort of storm which came out of nowhere doesn't hold water. It's been obvious since 1998 that it was the global market in mortgage derivatives that was financing the credit bubble and looking increasingly likely since 1994 that mortgage-backs and CDOs would be ground zero for a future credit crash.

Things are going exactly as many have long predicted, and it's pretty damn obvious how things will unfold from here. Credit bubbles, and crunches, follow particular patterns. They don't end with credit easing. They end with banks so impaired they can't lend, and "credit revulsion" amongst the population: people so shocked by what they've suffered they won't touch credit for the rest of their lives.

The trouble is that the large credit bubbles only happen once every three generations, so unless these finance experts take the trouble to read about financial history, they don't know what to expect.

PricewaterhouseCoopers are a bit of a disaster and I had hoped the Nationwide Building Society would have sacked them

Michael Stephen Nolan 4/12/07 4:05 pm

I was thinking more of the high heid yins from the various investment banks. The bean-counters are paid to look for what they've been trained to look for: fraud and gross stupidity. The executives of investment banks are the ones who should be looking at the bigger picture. The "global banking bosses" should have been aware of financial history, able to recognise a credit bubble for what it was, and make contingency plans.

As Corrigan has said, there's a herding instinct, which of course defines a bubble. However they're paid the giant bonuses to be able to get their heads above the stampede and see the cliff ahead.

Northern Rock's managers put their mouths fully to the credit spigot and appeared to give nary a thought to what they'd do if the teat ran dry.

'Investment banks', please define that.

When you spend all your waking hours in a fantasy world where breakfast, lunch and dinner merge into one round of insane displays of grandeur in places of incredible opulence you are going to miss out on some facts of life on the high street of anytown UK.

All these MPs, bankers, regulators, accountants and advisers move in the same circles, ever diminishing ones at that.

Totally divorced from reality, that's what it looks like from my tiny terraced house.

Well said Evan. The "real" criminals in our society are now so-called businessmen and businessmen that "back" the politicians (with bribes called election campaign funds) and thus the civil servants who now lust after "performance-based" pay akin to the businessmen.

Wheels within wheels. And strangley enough they are predominantly men, men driving around in "boy toys" (porsches) paid for with our hard earned pennies. Up the revolution and failing that may their you know whats shrivel up and fall off says I as a single woman and fleeced endowment policyholder.