DIY is not for everyone

Can't you read?

2) Mortgage brokers (who made money each time a loan was approved) didn't have to give a monkeys whether the loan was viable or not.

The banks part in this appears to be the repackaging exercise. Whose idea was that, is what I'd like to know. Who or what rated these things as AAA? Was it banks or ratings agencies? Who then bought the "larger packages"? Was it other banks? How come they were unaware that these packages were poisonous? Were they bought by arms of the banks that just treated them as assets and were unaware that other arms of banks had been doing this foolish bundling exercise?

Seems to me that we need the detail, because that should point at specific individuals, or groups thereof, who were actually to blame. Just saying "Oh, down with banks" doesn't help at all, anymore than believing that the antics of those twerps outside St Pauls is constructive

Yes 'tho not often. It's not the scared of heights issue I'm sometimes found up rather tall aerial masts and structures its just that the family especially my wife went through merry hell when I had that accident so out of respect for her feelings I try to use them as little was possible..

In article , Mark scribeth thus

Yes about the going rate here. A bit further down the road and that figure goes up again but thats the area where all the deals are done behind closed doors. One agent has people already waiting for that sort of place to come onto the market which they never seem to;!...

Indeed...

Err they did - or quite a lot of it LTSB shares were about £6.00, now about 35p last time I looked.

No they loaned the money initially to the banks at 12%. However they then stupidly IMO swapped the debt for equity, and as it always says on the tin share can go down as well as up. So in taking equity the government then gambled our money on the stock market. I think they've lost about £1bn on Northern Rock

It's like taking a loan from a crack dealer - no good will come of it.

Ok, who did decide to not check who they were lending to then?

I considered fixing masonry eyebolts around the house so that ladders could be made more stable. Someone convinced me that unless you could be sure they were always secure it might be less safe if one was wrongly assuming they were ok.

As far as harnesses and fall-arresters go, I recently saw on TV someone go up a ladder on to a roof then climb that until they reached a chimney with a TV aerial lashed to it. They clipped their safety line onto the lashed bracket. I couldn't help think that getting to the bracket at the start and end of the job added quite a lot of danger, and that if the chap fell having a TV aerial follow him back down to the ground might not help.

So let me see. A bank lends its money via a broker with no checks on whether it is safe or not. And still pays the broker his commission. And you think the bank is blameless?

It?s a bit more complicated then that The rot started in the US with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which are not banks,

That's the part I don't understand. I could quite easily make a speadsheet that would show the value of a bundle, knowing the value of the underlying mortgages. Do they not hire actuaries or mathematicians any more?

I already answered this question. I have no intention of repeating myself. Especially to those who aren't listening.

They do - they like numerate people (I knew a guy with a physics degree who worked for UBS).

Once you have an organisation whose sole job is to fiddle with money, there's a strong drive to use your collective intelligence to hoodwink others (be it organisations or individuals). It's very easy to move from playing "useful financial company" to "playing the long con game". The latter is essentially where several of the major players ended up.

It's not always the entire company - it could just be one major player within the company that destroys everything, thinking of Nick Leeson - though there are questions as to why the rest of the company did not have checks in place to stop lone nutters like him.

I'm not convinced that there was that much hoodwinking going on. Just human nature and a strong drive for you to earn more money than your colleagues, your team to earn more money than other teams, your division to earn more money than other divisions and your bank to earn more money than other banks.

Combine that with a lax regulatory regime, politicians who don't want the good times to stop, consumers who think they can spend, spend, spend without consequences and that's why we end up where we are. Saying "It's the banks" is simplistic.

It did. He was doing a number of things which were against the rules, but because he was apparently making lots of money, nobody bothered enquiring as to what was going on. Hopefully a lot of them lost their bonuses, jobs and pensions as a result.

Seeing that a goodly percentage of lashing wires are well rusted after some years of use. I wouldn't like to trust one;(..

The shareholders of the Irish banks certainly did. Even though the banks' debts were 'guaranteed' by the Govt, the individual shareholders saw the value of the shares plummet by 90%. So, from being almost a guaranteed nest-egg, they were suddenly owners of nearly worthless scraps of paper akin to Russian Imperial Railway shares.

At the time that Jill Dando was killed she was 'earning' ~20x what my GF at the time was. Said GF was an A&E doctor and FRCS - yes, it does make you think. Of course, doctors etc. are paid out of taxes so expenditure has to be limited, whereas BBC presenters are paid out of... oh.

They are paid out of voluntary taxes.

Good. They own(ed) the bank, they should have made sure it was being run properly. Although what was actually happening was that "activist" shareholders were pushing banks to do more of the things that eventually brought them down. The only people who should be protected in a bank collapse are retail depositors.