The inactivity and passivity the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee reflects must despair the upcoming generations.

Sir, I read twice your “The Bank of England augurs a year on hold”, and twice Richard Barwell’s “The great Monetary Policy Committee mystery”, November 6.

My conclusion is that were I 40 and some years younger, about to start working and thinking about a family, I would not be looking with kind eyes on the inactivity that is there reflected... 25 bp up or down or no change at all.

But, if I also knew that bank regulations, by means of capital requirements, were in Mark Twain’s terms giving banks further incentives to lend the umbrella when the sun was out, and to take it away when it looked like it was going to rain, then I would really be pissed off. What do these bank regulators mean? Is the avoidance by banks of perceived credit risks, more important than my future?

And from John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Money: Whence it came where it went” 1975, I would quote to those respectable and so political correct bank regulators the following:

“For the new parts of the country [USA’s West]… there was the right to create banks at will and therewith the notes and deposits that resulted from their loans…[if] the bank failed…someone was left holding the worthless notes… but some borrowers from this bank were now in business...[jobs created]..

It was an arrangement which reputable bankers and merchants in the East viewed with extreme distaste… Men of economic wisdom, then as later expressing the views of the reputable business community, spoke of the anarchy of unstable banking… The men of wisdom missed the point. The anarchy served the frontier far better than a more orderly system that kept a tight hand on credit would have done…. what is called sound economics is very often what mirrors the needs of the respectfully affluent…

The function of credit in a simple society is, in fact, remarkably egalitarian. It allows the man with energy and no money to participate in the economy more or less on a par with the man who has capital of his own. And the more casual the conditions under which credit is granted and hence the more impecunious those accommodated, the more egalitarian credit is… Bad banks, unlike good, loaned to the poor risk, which is another name for the poor man.”

Bank regulators do you not know that the upcoming generation is already living new economic Wild West realities, made worse by having to suffer these under the thumb of a West Coast type bank regulatory establishment?

@PerKurowski ©