Blimpish || a Tory

Over the past few decades, we’ve become less and less trusting of each other, living more and more apart.  How many of us really know our next-door neighbours?  How able are we to strike up a conversation with a stranger?  The causes of this are probably many, and some of them might be good things in other ways – more multiculturalism, more careerism, fading socal hierarchy.

But it seems to me fairly obvious that since the homogeneity (warm bath or stifling hell, whichever’s your poison) of the 1950s, we now have a much more isolated, anonymous, fissiparous society.  It’s not that we distrust each other; it’s just that we don’t really trust each other either?

And yet, the super-smart people being paid millions of pounds to run our banks in this new world thought that it was OK to lend sums worth several times earnings to pay more than 100% of a house’s value, and even to allow earnings to be self-declared.  They invested in securities which represented other institutions lending to those kinds of purchases, without a thought to what their exact composition might be, just because it was another bank offering them for sale.

Isn’t it a bit funny that, just as we’ve all stopped trusting people in general as much as we used to, banks went in completely the opposite direction?  Back in the 1950s, they were famously closed institutions: in a world where people had a common culture and experience with which to understand each other, banks just didn’t lend unless they were absolutely sure.  By the late 1990s, anybody who’d previously paid back a credit card bill but had only vague work history and vague plans for the future could get an advance.

Just sayin’.