As if by magic following my previous post, John Redwood asks some questions:

If the bankers who did the lending were greedy and wrong, weren’t the shareholders in the banks similarly guilty as they were happy to receive the dividends from all that excessive lending? Didn’t that include most people in the country?

The Church Commissioners who pay the clergy salaries doubtless owned lots of bank shares, as did practically every pension fund in the country. I don’t remember them speaking out at Bank shareholder meetings asking for the banks to grow less and pay smaller dividends.

Yup:

We all lived through the age of private sector irresponsibility, and are now all having to live through the age of government financial irresponsibility. It’s a very one sided morality which condemns lending too much but does not condemn borrowing too much.

It’s even more bizarre that over lending only matters if it is done by a private sector bank but is encouraged if done by a nationalised one.

We are all in it together. So let’s adopt a certain humility?