Britain’s mortgage crisis
One of Britain’s banks crashed all the way down to 88-tenths before another bigger bank rode to the rescue and Prime Minister Brown was in on the negotiations. This analyst says the crisis in the U.S. rolled right around to Britain. One of the potential problems is a lack of competition, but the government is so concerned about the viability of the banking industry, it’s overriding those concerns. People seem to be drowning their concerns at pubs, like this one. This analyst says the concerns are pretty much what he expects, even though the average person in Britain is more concerned about their personal savings than the banking system, a sharp contrast to Americans. The other big difference is the U.K. has just a few hundred banks as opposed to thousands in the U.S. so the government is even more protective when one goes down.
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