BASHING banks is easy, not to mention fun, and usually they deserve what they get.
Just now it seems fair to suggest that they have done sterling work in the worst of circumstances.
A few numbers from Barclays today: it arranged 600,000 payment holidays for loans and credit cards, it provided £22 billion of Covid-19 support for businesses and it kept 88,000 staff in work, albeit mostly from home.
In the financial crisis of 2008 money was funnelled into banks to keep them afloat. This time it has been funnelled from them to keep the country afloat.
As Barclays bad debt provision of £3.7 billion shows, in many cases the banks won’t get that money back.
They did collectively owe us from last time, but they seem to have mostly done what we needed them to do.
Barclays chief Jes Staley can claim particular vindication. For five years he has been fending off calls to ditch the investment banking arm from those who said it was a risk and a distraction from Barclays “core” business of high street banking.
His point always was that high street banking isn’t inherently safer than Wall Street trading and that one could offset the other especially in periods of high unemployment.
Today it is clear that the whizz-kid dealers, the guys in braces we have been trained to dislike, effectively bailed out the supposedly boring bit of the bank.
They will be well rewarded for their trouble, of course. But just for once we might concede that we are glad they are there.
