Something rotten in the heart of capitalism

Reuters reports:

Paul Tucker, the [Bank of England's] executive director for markets, said banks had to incur the losses when things went wrong and that changes to the banking sector had not gone far enough yet to allow for that.

"If we have a system where banks take the upside, but the taxpayer takes the downside, something has gone wrong with capitalism, with the very heart of capitalism, and we need to repair this," he told BBC television.

"We want the upside to go to the shareholders and to some extent the managers, but the downside must go with that too. This is going to require big changes internationally."

Who could disagree? But Tucker doesn't go far enough with his analysis, neither does he heed the words of Jesus to take the beam out of his own eye, before removing the speck in someone else's.

The central bank itself is the biggest and most dangerous interloper in the capitalist system. It is no quirk of ideology that it is a central plank of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, thus:

"These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable...

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly."

Tucker may well mean well, but he needs to understand that government monopolies and central planning committees have nothing to do with capitalism.