Northern Rock and Banking Reform

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey). He made a powerful point, to which the Government would do well to listen, about the dangers of producing a system of regulation that might have prevented the problem we have just experienced, but would create new problems for very different sorts of building societies. I also pay tribute to the Treasury Committee and its Chairman, the right hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (John McFall), for the valuable report that provides the substance for today's debate. It is slightly surprising, however, that it is the only substance for the debate. Last time we debated Northern Rock we rushed through legislation, having been told that it was essential to set aside the normal process of parliamentary scrutiny so that steps could be taken rapidly by the new management at Northern Rock which would bring about a new situation. We expected those steps to be taken rapidly, and we expected some illumination to follow, although we were not given it at the time of the nationalisation debate. We expected to know more about the competition rules and regulations, and the approach that we would have to adopt. None of that has happened. We could have had proper parliamentary scrutiny at the time, but we were denied it, not because of the needs of the business but because of the desire of the Government to escape the embarrassment of prolonged debate. I do not intend to pursue that point, however. Instead, I want to examine some of the factors underlying the problem of Northern Rock and the problems of the banking system, both nationally and internationally. Let me begin by mentioning a mistake which is so basic that no one in the Chamber has made or would make it, but which was commonly made by many commentators at the time when Northern Rock's problems were exposed. They said ““The problem is that Northern Rock has been borrowing short and lending long.”” Well, of course it had: that is what banks do. If it had not borrowed short and lent long, it would not have been a bank. It is intrinsic to the nature of fractional reserve banking that banks borrow short and lend long. Banks tell depositors that they can have their money back on demand or at very short notice, but in practice only a fraction of the people who deposit money at any one moment want it back, so the banks need keep only a fraction of the money liquid and in reserve. In normal circumstances, they will be able to invest long-term in less liquid assets. That is the nature of fractional reserve banking, but it is also why fractional reserve banking systems, although stable in normal circumstances, are potentially and intrinsically unstable. If everybody decides they want to remove their money—as they have the right to do, and as the banks have promised them they can—they cannot do so because the banks only have a fraction of the money on reserve. We can draw an analogy with bridges: if people walk over a bridge in the usual random fashion it might carry 1,000 people, but if all those people march over it in step, it will collapse. The banking system can operate if some people are putting money in and others are taking money out, but if they all decide to take money out, it collapses, as we discovered when people formed queues outside Northern Rock branches. It follows that there are only two possible approaches. One is the extreme but rigorous intellectual one proposed by people such as Murray Rothbard, which I do not think has many supporters in this House—apart, possibly, from the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson)—which asserts that fractional reserve banking is intrinsically fraudulent and that it should not be allowed or sustained. As a result, banks would find that they had to keep 100 per cent. of their assets in liquid reserves and would cease to be fractional reserve banks. I would not propose that view, but if we do not accept it, we must instead have a lender of last resort who is prepared to step in and prevent a bank from failing if there is the remotest chance of that bank failure spreading to other banks and causing people to want to withdraw their money simultaneously—to march in step rather than put money in and take it out in the usual random fashion—and that must be accompanied by deposit insurance. I think that the Bank of England might momentarily have forgotten that intrinsically it has to operate as a lender of last resort, and have thought instead that moral hazard overrode that position so it had to let Northern Rock go belly up. That cannot be allowed to happen; the lender of last resort is so important that it must at times override the concerns about moral hazard to protect depositors and to prevent the contagion of other banks—but not, of course, to protect the shareholders. There is no obligation on the Government or central bank to prop up the value of shares; people have put their equity at risk, and they know that they can lose it—and, as we are aware, there are, of course, equity risks in other areas. Although we must accept this fundamental nature of the banking system, while we are looking afresh at our banking and mortgage finance systems, we might also look at the experience of other countries. The right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras mentioned a point that I have previously made: the Spaniards have demonstrated that if banks are required to consolidate all their loans and operations, which we elsewhere have allowed them to take off balance sheet, they are less likely to go down the road that has led to the sub-prime crisis in most other countries. We might also look at what happens in Switzerland, Hungary and some other countries where mortgage loans are generally required to match more closely the term of deposits and bonds. That may result in slightly more expensive mortgages over their life, if short-term interest rates are on average a bit lower than long-term interest rates, but it produces a more stable system. There is a case for examining more closely what happens in countries that require that and which do not seem to have had these problems. They also do not seem to have had as much housing market inflation as our system has had. The second fallacy that is frequently uttered in the public discussion of these issues is the suggestion that the credit crisis that we have experienced worldwide is caused by banks becoming more imprudent. If anything, the reverse is the case. The credit crisis has revealed the problem of imprudence at certain banks in certain cases, but it has not been caused by that. When the tide goes out we see who was swimming naked—we learn who forgot to put on their bathing trunks. The fact that they did not put on their bathing trunks did not cause the tide to go out. When the credit tide ebbed, we discovered which banks' lending had been less prudent than others, but that less prudent lending did not necessarily cause the tide to ebb. A third frequently made statement is that the problem was that banks chose to invest in risky assets when they should have put their money into safe assets. By and large, banks would have preferred to put their money into safe assets; they put their money into risky assets only because there were not enough safe assets with notable returns. Why were they being led in that direction? Why did they spontaneously and across the world start investing in more risky assets?