Just Exactly Why Can't Banks Be Allowed To Fail?

Letter to the Financial Times February 28 2009

Dear Sir,

Your editorial in today's newspaper (Saving HM Royal Bank of Scotland) makes several references to the presumed immunity of banks to normal commercial pressures (too big to fail, the banks must be saved, clearly cannot be allowed to fail). Would you please explain why? Over the past 18 months or so, I cannot readily recall reading a reasoned justification of that presumption, yet it underpins all efforts to confront the crisis.

If Woolworths and Zavvi and MFI and other businesses can be allowed to go bust, why not banks? As a provider of a range of media services to large financial institutions, and to publications that depend on selling to large financial institutions, I have a vested interest in the status quo ante being reinstated, and soon, please. But I still cannot find any real justification why banks are a special case for which the laws of financial gravity must be repealed.

Yours sincerely,

Brian Bollen