In Tudor times,  begging outside of your home town boundaries was a crime punishable by the stocks. There, to humiliate and embarrass you, local people would throw rotten tomatoes and other vegetables.

 

Some 500 years later we’ve moved on from such uncivilised punishments.  Or have we? Last week’s bankers’ Treasury Select Committee ( TSC ) hearings looked awfully like the stocks to me.

 

Chairmen and Chief Executives of the major banks, who were found to have begged for new funding outside of their own countries, were told to sit in the glare of the TV cameras for hours at a time, answering question after insult.

 

Carefully prepared sound -bites, e.g “What are your feelings having destroyed one of Britain’s largest banks?” were thrown at the guilty and, rather like a rotten tomato, they slid off the face without lasting damage. None of us were much the wiser and everybody was assumed to be guilty.

 

It is not so much the substance I’m complaining about in this blog (although if anyone - banker, journalist, regulator or MP-predicted the world’s first ever peacetime liquidity freeze then I didn’t hear them ). 

 

 It’s the TSC process, where the questioners inevitably have less details than the questioned ( so few definitive answers given ),  and where the stocks occupiers, by slightly inclining their heads,  and   lowering their voices in a supplicant manner, walk away smelling of rotten tomatoes only as far as the next shower.

 

What has happened to the world’s economy, destroying household-name banks and  bringing others to their knees, is truly shocking. We need the most comprehensive enquiry. But the TSC isn’t it.

 

Does it matter if it isn’t it? Yes it does if people think that the two televised interviews achieved much more than pelting the bankers.

 

It could be obscuring the fact that our only solution to the current crisis-tapping the international capital markets with a return to simple transparent securitisation structures-is being ignored in a cloud of confusion, under which many new initiatives are having the reverse impact and actually reducing new liquidity in the market.