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Jeremy:
it has not been a very good week for the markets....

Jeremy;
sad fact to the markets, that it may not stop yet...and it could have many more sleep-less nights to come.

For the last time IT WAS NOT A MERGER. It was a rescue takeover.

Stop pretending HBOS wasn't in trouble and that it was a meeting of minds over a cuppa tea. HBOS was in serious trouble because its liability maturation window was closing, so LloydsTSB bid to take its assets (which were more than LloydsTSB's own) and its liabilities (which were massive relative to their assets).

Come on people, its not that complicated ...

I suspect the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ knew about the takeover before Brown and Darling, so you probably inadvertantly gave them time to claim the credit for saving HBOS and making a rapid change in the rules so the merger could go through. Imagine a Labour party allowing big business to actually get bigger without the Left wing screaming blue murder and the unions threatening retribution on all and sundry, changed days, when survival in government is at stake, anything, however contrary to Socialist dogma, is allowable.

Jeremy

your coverage of this week has been comical.

This crash has been coming for years, the day they stopped publishing the m3 index this was the only outcome.

Your coverage has been comical because you have blamed the buzz words 'credit crunch' and 'sub-prime'. These are not the cause of the economic problems but are just two of the mechanisms to create it.

The cause of our collapse is 'central banking', 'fractional reserve banking' and 'fiat currencies'.

I have been writing to the bbc for about a year now about all this and lo and behold look whats happened.

So now you are actually hailing the central banks as the saviours in all of this. When whats actually happening is we are throwing fuel onto the fire.

then again you guys are just doing your job of keeping people ill-informed.

Jeremy

Where were the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ when the first sub-prime casualties happened in 2004? Did the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ make the connection with Enron and others that there was serious overvaluing of assets because of the lack of regulation of the banking sector and the corporate network?

Just how deep does the "old boys" network run and just what secret hollows do these pimps on society meet to discuss their next million dollar/pound nice little earner?

It is pure fantasy to blame it on the "short-termers" who are simply echoing what they see the whole financial sector doing. Whose money do the banks hold and why should they be allowed to hold the rest of us to ransom as if they do a "mighty good job"?

This collapse is an utter disgrace and ordinary people should be hunting down those responsible wherever they have chosen to run to. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ should know better than to label criminals because they wear common clothes - the pin stripe has for far too long masked the worse and most greedy elements of our society for far too long. Are the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ to run a deep and thorough investigative piece of this whole fiasco?

I'm with you, One_Marble_Left. How come there is no connection with this crisis and the US Government's lack of regulation of the markets?

And how does nationalizing debt - or however the Bush rescue plan is described - going to make any difference? Isn't giving carte blanche to the same idiots that got the world's economics into this mes in the first place? There must be a group of people that have made billions of dollars profit from this debacle, why aren't they being investigated and at least have "wind fall" taxes applied?

Well what a merger, and obviously to be in advanced merger talks means that the opening gambits were happening a few days before. The fact that HBOS was looking to a relative minnow like Lloyds to actually create liquidity says a lot about the actual state of the Banking industry. Where for example is HSBC in all of this, why has there been not a murmer out of them? More to the point was it prudent fo Barclays to buy out Lehman Brothers real estate for that amount when property prices must be suspect? The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ talked today of the US Government backing the bad liquidity to 700 Billion USD. This as a figure is so vast that I dont think most could imagine it, so it must be a rerun of what my dad used to say.
If you owe the Bank £100 that youre problem
If you Owe the bank £3,000 thats your problem.
I f you owe the bank 30 Million that's their problem
It now seems that if the Banks owe 1 trillion thats a Government problem and thats our problem.
Answer don't be greedy just opt for the 30 million.

We dont need ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ TV reporters to add to the madness and irrational behavior of shareholders that we have all witnessed over the last two weeks.

Panic is fine it presents opportunity for the more mature of us but to see anchormen like Rico Hizon almost seem disappointed markets returning to some level of sanity leaves me as a viewer angry and disgusted.

Like an excited schoolboy at a football game he shock both his hands looking for an answer to his repeated questioning his guest of what signal should be looking for to send markets sprialling down again.

Please ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ you should be one bastion we have left please drop the sensationalism and not be part of the problem. Trillions have been lost by millions. many are hurting.

#9.

"the madness and irrational behavior of shareholders..."

Surely that is the problem of the past decade that companies have been over valued to attract inappropriate investment and investors have shown a gung-ho attitude to throwing good money after bad.

And the problem with what is now happening is that we are seeing those who support a FREE market playing politics with economics and using methods that suggest things are much worse than they have been saying.

If capitalism is in crisis then it is going to do no one any good pretending it isn't. The truth is, as far as my eyes and ears can tell, that capitalism has been is crisis since Enron first hit the news. It is time to stop pretending and to start acting to ensure that a free market has the necessary rules and regulations to prevent repetitions of this kind. I see the good money being thrown after bad again - I don't see the political sea change necessary to make sure there is NO bad money.

This guys says it better than I could...

The problem with Henry Paulson


The solution to the economic disaster...


Wise words, that President Bush will simply shrug off, as he finds creative new ways to destroy the Capitalist infrastructure.

I agree with some of the comments above. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ seems to be completely naive about the economic crisis yet to come.

Dear Mr Hildman

Can you please advise me whether the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is meant to provide the views, and also updates on what is happening to the whole nation, who are not conditioned into free market ideology and have paid their TV license fee for years, or like the government only count people who are wealthy as worth spending any time on regarding the credit crunch.

The `free market propaganda' and fear the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has allowed these 'capitalism at all costs, robots to spew out incessantly is nothing short of disgraceful.

Your programmes such as Newsnight and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News 24 have in the majority of cases have had these people on who see nothing wrong with destroying people's lives by their greed.

This time they have not only made disgusting amounts of money out of a massive amount of peoples misery, as they have done in the past also, but they are now so powerful and arrogant that when profits are falling they blackmail the taxpayer to bail them out in order that they can live in a standard they believe is their right.

Robert Peston has stated a couple of times on Newsnight that the the problem in the markets is`the banks wont release the money to each other, as they are not sure which banks are safe,' however, it is okay for the fat cats of the banking industry and the money markets to keep their huge salaries, bonuses etc, while the ordinary man in the street is simply labelled as `collateral damage'.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News 24 has just announced that 327 jobs are to go at Bradford and Bingley; can you advise me why the following could not have been done, rather than pay these workers off:

1. How much money does the the Bradford and Bingley have at this time, I am not an economist, so I will call it spare cash, and if it has significantly more than £15 million why can that not be used until next year, thus avoiding paying these 327 people off.

2. Why do they not pay off the fat cat executives who have been part of the cause of the financial problem our country and the world faces because of their greed to make as much money as they could for themselves, and without any thought about the consequences to their staff and the ordinary man in the street. They could be replaced by cheaper labour by employing a new CEO and directors at greatly reduced salaries, as happens to the ordinary worker.

Like many others in this country who have been laid off, or have not worked for a while and claim benefits, these 327 people will now become part of the invisible and easily dispensed with part of society, `the fat and lazy', as David Cameron labels people in that position, Gordon Brown has also forgotten about the vulnerable and poor members of our society, as in fact all parties have; plenty of talk, but that is all it is.

It is time the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ stood up for the majority of people in this country, whether they pay a TV license or not, or are working or not, or are black or white, able or disabled, male or female instead of advertising and promoting the values of the `free market', which the American taxpayers and the rest of the world are going to pay for, and suffer the consequences for years to come.

While the people who have caused this crisis walk away as if nothing has happened, and have the arrogance to still defend this evil trade in misery; as that is all free market capitalism provides for the majority of people, even most of those in work.

Last night on Newsnight Scotland they showed figures that sales in the retail and other sectors had fallen, and their was drop in business confidence in these sectors, what else was going to happen when the `debt bubble' burst, we have not been a prosperous country over the last 10 years as is peddled by the government, some people have become mega rich, but the majority of ordinary people have improved their living standards by taking on massive amounts of debt, and now even if they could get more credit they could not pay it back.

How can this be prosperity, surely prosperity is when people earn enough money to buy things, and are able to save some money in a bank account. I must stress I am very well aware that in relation to many African counties and others elsewhere in the world the last 10 years would be classed as prosperous, but we are not these countries and the UK has had great amount of wealth over the past 10 years in which to reduce inequality, child poverty, pay for expensive medicines, but instead this money has went to a very few very wealthy people. The poverty in Africa can also be attributed to capitalism, as the IMF and the WBO when providing capital to these countries insist that they must accept free market policies, thus jobs are cut and spending on crucial services such as Health, Education etc has to be slashed before they can get any money.

This crisis had to come, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the strategy Margaret Thatcher followed at the bequest of Morgan Friedman in the 1980s will be used again; remember those days of 3 million unemployed and massive home repossessions, immaterial whether the US taxpayer (who are we kidding they don't have a say) spends $700 billion dollars this time, these free market `masters of the universe' will take steps to ensure their profits are maintained at any cost, and that means unemployment, slave labour wages and repossessions guaranteed.

I demand the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and their programme editors and people like yourself Jeremy start reporting the actual consequences and spread fear through abstract words, just as George Bush is demanding that he and his buddies are bailed out by the taxpayers, so as they can continue to make massive fortunes out of the free market , while the majority of ordinary people will lose their houses, or have to accept wage cuts and be grateful they have got a job with a wage that they cannot survive on.

Is the greenspan put going to be renamed a bush put; I hope not.

Is the Greenspan put going to be re-named the bush put; I hope not.