Darling: Cyprus Savings Raid Could Trigger Bank Runs Across Europe
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Bank runs and financial panic could spread across Europe after Cyprus proposed raiding people's savings for a new bail-out, Alistair Darling has said.

The former Chancellor said Cyprus is doing "everything you should not do" after the tiny country decided to seize around 6.75 per cent from smaller deposits and almost 10 per cent from larger ones.

The country is currently deciding whether to make richer savers pay a bigger proportion of the bill but Mr Darling said the whole idea of taking money from ordinary savers is dangerous.

He said EU should not be letting Cyprus "blow apart" the principle of protecting deposits under €100,000, as people will start pulling their cash out of banks if they fear this elsewhere.

"It seems to me to make it more likely that if you’re a saver in Spain or Italy, if you have a sniff of the EU or the IMF coming your way you’ll take your money out and you’ll get a run on the bank," he told BBC Radio Four's Today programme.

"So what they’re doing is everything you should not do when you’re trying to solve a problem like this." » | Rowena Mason, Political Correspondent | Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Darling Attacks Germans Over Help for Greece
THE TELEGRAPH: The euro has been permanently damaged by Germany's failure to intervene swiftly during the sovereign debt crisis earlier this year, Alistair Darling has said in an unusually frank attack.

The former Chancellor, who was in 11 Downing Street when Greece, Spain and Portugal came close to economic meltdown in the spring, made his unguarded comments at a conference of senior German and British officials on Thursday.

Privately, he is known to have been infuriated by Germany's failure to act swiftly as the markets scented blood, but has never before made his opinions public.

Speaking from the audience of the Königswinter Conference, he told Germany's Economics Minister Rainer Bruederle that the country had completely failed to come to terms with its responsibilities as a leader of the eurozone. He added that its reluctance intervene quickly "will have consequences" for the political future of the bloc. Read on and comment >>> Philip Aldrick, Economics Editor | Friday, September 17, 2010

Alistair Darling Trapped in Euro Deal
THE TELEGRAPH: Alistair Darling has agreed to consult directly with George Osborne and Vince Cable as European leaders looked poised to push through a new multi-billion pound bail-out fund part-financed by British taxpayers.

Mr Darling, who is still officially Chancellor of the Exchequer, will represent Britain at an extraordinary meeting of European finance ministers in Brussels today, slated to adopt far-reaching new powers for the Commission and its fellow bodies.

The meeting is the first major policy test for the hung parliament, coming with Britain in limbo between two governments. In a sign of the highly unusual nature of the situation, the Chancellor has privately committed to consulting before the meeting with his counterparts in the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

However, despite the likelihood that Labour will be ejected from Downing Street imminently, Mr Darling will have the final say over Britain's vote on participation in the new scheme.

The proposal, tabled by Nicolas Sarkozy in an emergency meeting late on Friday night, will involve the creation of a €60bn "European stabilisation mechanism" designed to provide bail-out support for countries which may face similar strain to Greece in the coming months.

It is thought to be focused particularly on Spain and Portugal, both of whose leaders fear an assault by "bond vigilantes" in the market who have scented weakness within the eurozone. The plan will have fiscal implication for all European Union countries, including the UK. The key element is an extension of an existing bail-out package, already used to support Hungary and Latvia. >>> Edmund Conway and Bruno Waterfield | Saturday, May 08, 2010

Budget 2010: Darling Soaks the Rich
THE TELEGRAPH: Alistair Darling has used his pre-election Budget to announce billions of pounds of new taxes on the better off to help him pay off Labour’s huge Government deficits.



The Chancellor also set out pre-election sweeteners for key voters, including a stamp duty cut for first-time buyers, funded by a tax increase on buyers of £1 million houses. Budget 2010: Labour taxes the rich to pay for borrowing >>> James Kirkup, Political Correspondent | Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Supertax to Claw Back Bankers' Huge Bonuses
Photo: Times Online
TIMES ONLINE: Alistair Darling is preparing to introduce a punitive new tax on bankers’ bonuses in a Pre-Budget Report that will draw the battle lines for the next general election.

The Chancellor is expected to argue that, because billions of pounds of public cash was used to bail out the financial sector, taxpayers have a right to a larger share of bankers’ payouts.

Accountants expressed doubts over the practicality of such a tax, claiming that it could breach human rights.

Yesterday Mr Darling said that voters would expect “the broadest shoulders to bear the greatest burden” when it came to restoring the public finances. Although final details have yet to be agreed, it is understood that he has bowed to pressure from Gordon Brown and is considering a supertax on individual bankers who receive bonuses over a certain level.

John Whiting, tax partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that it was unprecedented for a particular occupation to be targeted in this way. “This is difficult on several levels,” he said. “It smacks of discrimination.” >>> Francis Elliott, Deputy Political Editor, and Patrick Hosking, Financial Editor | Monday, December 07, 2009

MAIL ONLINE: 'Super tax' on bank bonuses: After fury over huge payouts, Alistair Darling to target City fat cats >>> James Chapman | Monday, December 07, 2009

BBC: Banks criticise plans for windfall tax on bonuses: British banking chiefs have reacted angrily to news the Treasury is considering a one-year windfall tax on bonuses paid to some UK-based bankers. >>> | Monday, December 07, 2009

We Are in Charge Now, Sarkozy Tells the City
TIMES ONLINE: Alistair Darling has delivered a blunt warning to the EU’s new French finance chief against meddling with the City of London.

As Nicolas Sarkozy gloated over impending curbs on the City, the Chancellor said that such moves would drive financial services out of Europe.

The French President’s glee at the appointment of Michel Barnier as Commissioner for the Single Market took on an edge of menace yesterday when he said that unfettered City practices must end.

“Do you know what it means for me to see for the first time in 50 years a French European commissioner in charge of the internal market, including financial services, including the City [of London]?" he said yesterday.

"I want the world to see the victory of the European model, which has nothing to do with the excesses of financial capitalism," he said. >>> Francis Elliott, Suzy Jagger, Martin Waller and David Charter | Wednesday, December 02, 2009

TIMES ONLINE: Banks blast 'hostile' Sarkozy over City rule gibe >>> Robert Lindsay | Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Budget 2009: Now We Are All Up to Our Ears in It
THE TELEGRAPH: Alistair Darling's calamitous Budget not only consigned the nation to decades of debt, but also planted a poisonous legacy that will blight generations to come, says Jeff Randall.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." – Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

This week, Alistair Darling made a selection for us. His Budget for Bankruptcy banished economy and liberty. In their place, he delivered a profusion of unaffordable spending and a contract of servitude, not just for this generation, but for the next and the one after that. This is how independence is murdered. A ball-and-chain of spirit-sapping debt has been clamped to the nation's future. We are all serfs now.

In a speech of stunning torpidity (how does he manage it?), the Chancellor claimed: "You can grow your way out of recession, you can't cut your way out of it." Growth sounds attractive, an aspiration for solid citizens. Except the growth that Mr Darling had in mind was government borrowing, which is shooting up like bindweed on steroids, choking the economy.

His red numbers are so immense that most pocket calculators cannot accommodate them. Over the next five years – if all goes according to plan – Mr Darling will borrow £703,000,000,000. As the late Roy Castle used to say: "It's a record breaker!"

The United Kingdom is mired in debt, and the Chancellor's fiendishly clever escape route is, er, to borrow his way out of it. He's in a hole and digging furiously. Yet Gordon Brown, whose face is beginning to resemble a smacked bottom, was delighted by his cipher's performance. This style of presentation – straight from the Ceausescu handbook of statistics management – appeals to the Prime Minister's control-freakery.

It sounds complicated, but is surprisingly simple. You start with a politically desirable conclusion – in this case, the triumph of a suffocating state over personal responsibility, self-sufficiency and wealth-creating enterprise – and work backwards: cheating, lying, fiddling the numbers, until both sides of the balance sheet appear to be in harmony. This is how Labour operated its fraudulent boom. The same trick is being tried in a catastrophic bust. >>> By Jeff Randall | Thursday, April 23, 2009

THE TELEGRAPH: This Budget Will Make Us Pay for Britain's Excesses for Decades

Now we must all pay for the wild excesses of an irresponsible minority, says Adrian Michaels.

I wish I had known I was having such a good time. I will, according to the Budget, be paying for the country's excesses for decades. It is time to pull in the horns and tighten the belt. But wait. My belt doesn't have any more notches. I've been presented by Alistair Darling with the bill for a party I didn't attend.

For months now we have been hearing that it is bankers that brought the global economy to its knees through their irresponsible business practices, made possible by compliant and inattentive politicians and regulators. Meanwhile, people in financial services were paid far too much for their destructive corporate behaviour.

How much, exactly? In December 2007, 15 bankers – all men, of course – sat down for lunch at the Cap Horn, a mountain restaurant in the French ski resort of Courchevel. It was just turning dark when they paid the 28,000 euro bill. There were no prostitutes or drugs, I am informed, and the near-2,000 euros-a-head tab did not afford access to the President of the United States. No. The bankers were playing "Par One Hundred" – a drinking game in which the object would appear to be to vomit on your neighbour as fast as possible – with magnums of Krug champagne. The Cap Horn currently charges 850 euros for a magnum of 1997 Krug.

So what? "They're on a different planet," one friend said. That is the problem, however: bankers are not on a different planet, they are on exactly the same one as the rest of us. If they really were otherworldly, we could just forget about them and their lunches. But we all pay the price for their behaviour. The cheapest item on the Cap Horn's menu is cream cheese with salt and pepper at 13 euros. "Spaghetti à la Bolognaise" is 25 euros.

So not only weren't we at the party that has just ended, the quality of our own lives was made worse by the fiesta's participants. Bankers made sure that we could not eat in the same restaurants as in the past, we could not take holidays in a growing range of destinations, and we could not live where we wanted. Ask the residents of Salcombe in Devon – "Chelsea-on-Sea" as it has become known – about the empty homes in winter and the fancy delis selling porcini mushrooms instead of corner shops selling pints of milk and packets of Quavers. >>> By Adrian Michaels | Thursday, April 23, 2009

European Finance Ministers to Attack Alistair Darling over Sterling's Slide
European finance ministers are planning to round on Alistair Darling and tell him to bring the pound back under control, in what many fear could represent the opening salvo of a "currency war".

French and German ministers are expected to confront the Chancellor over sterling's weakness at the opening dinner for the Group of Seven finance summit in Rome tonight. They will ask him to consider direct action to increase the value of the pound, which has suffered its worst devaluation since at least the final breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s.

It came as the pound dropped further against a range of currencies, following the Bank of England's unexpected acknowledgement earlier this week that it plans to start buying gilts imminently as part of its quantitative easing efforts. Sterling fell more than a cent against the dollar to $1.4248, although it did strengthen marginally against the euro. >>> By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor | Friday, February 13, 2009

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Alistair Darling Calls for World’s Financial Leaders to Take Decisive Action
TIMESONLINE: £2.7 trillion wiped off the global value of shares as confidence collapses

A frenzied day of panic selling across the world capped a week of extraordinary financial mayhem in which £2.7 trillion was wiped off the value of global shares.

Finance ministers and central bank chiefs from the West’s leading economies were moving to quell the fear last night with moves to shore up their banking systems and prevent a full-scale meltdown of the world financial system. Such was the level of panic, however, that officials gathered in Washington were forced to contemplate the previously unthinkable: that Britain’s enfeebled banks may face outright nationalisation if Gordon Brown’s £50 billion bailout fails.

As stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic suffered record-breaking falls, ministers and central bank governors from the Group of Seven (G7) economies strove to piece together a united plan to avert financial cataclysm. Alistair Darling Calls for World’s Financial Leaders to Take Decisive Action >>> Gary Duncan, Economics Editor | October 10, 2008

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Bank Shares Plunge up to 40% in an Hour After News of £50bn Banks Deal Was Leaked to the BBC
MAIL Online: Banks 'ask Darling for £50billion cash injection' / Royal Bank of Scotland shares plunge a massive 40% / FTSE rally wiped out as it tumbles back into the red / British savers frozen out by Icelandic internet bank / EU summit to discuss £80,000 savings guarantee

British banking shares plunged today after it was claimed finance chiefs had asked the Chancellor for a £50billion bail-out to stave off further turmoil.

The report by BBC business editor Robert Peston unleashed a fresh day of chaos on the Stock Market, with shares in Royal Bank of Scotland tumbling by 40 per cent at one stage in early trading.

Its value plummeted by a massive £10billion on top of the 20 per cent fall yesterday despite the bank's denial that it had asked the Government for capital at a secret meeting last night.

Lloyds TSB also saw its value drop up to 26 per cent. HBOS fell by 23 per cent and Barclays by 17 per cent as investors panicked at the prospect of household names being part-nationalised and launched a mass sell-off.

After its biggest ever one-day drop in history, the Stock Exchange initially rallied by almost three per cent on the back of a late surge on Wall Street and a huge rates cut in Australia but the turmoil around the banking sector soon dragged it back into the red.

Throughout the morning, it swung between positive and negative territory in an echo of the mixed fortunes of markets in Asia and Australia overnight. Bank Shares Plunge up to 40% in an Hour After News of £50bn Banks Deal Was Leaked to the BBC >>> By Nicola Boden | October 7, 2008

THE TELEGRAPH:
Financial Crisis: Alistair Darling Under Fire over Banking Meltdown: Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, is under fire after the banking crisis intensified as billions were wiped off the value of Britain's high-street banks in minutes. >>> By Robert Winnett, Deputy Political Editor | October 7, 2008

THE TELEGRAPH:
Financial Crisis: Who Is Advising Alistair Darling?: The team helping Alistair Darling to prepare Britain's response to the ongoing financial turmoil.

Geoffrey Spence is one of the central figures in the small team around Mr Darling drawing up plans to help struggling banks.
Mr Spence, was a former senior investment banker at HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Allco Finance Group who joined the Treasury's Council of Economic Advisers in April. He previously helped mastermind the Government's controversial private finance initiative. >>> By Robert Winnett, Deputy Political Editor | October 7, 2008

Watch FT video: RBS Shares Plunge >>> | October 7, 2008
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The Labour Party Has Done It Again! Darling Warns of Economic Crisis
Photo of Alastair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, courtesy of The Guardian
BBC: The UK is facing its worst economic crisis in 60 years, Chancellor Alistair Darling has admitted.

He told the Guardian newspaper that the economic downturn would be more "profound and long-lasting" than most people had feared.

Using strong language, Mr Darling acknowledged voters were angry with Labour's handling of the economy.

Ministers are expected to announce a package of measures next week to kick-start the moribund housing market.

Voter anger

House prices are falling at their fastest rate in 18 years, leading to fears of a wave of repossessions in the upcoming months.

Mortgage lending has slowed dramatically due to the credit crunch while key indicators have suggested that the economy could be poised to go into recession in the near future.

The economy showed no growth in the second quarter of the year while building firms and retailers have laid off thousands of staff in recent weeks amid fears that the economy will deteriorate further. Darling Warns of Economic Crisis >>> | August 29, 2008

THE GUARDIAN:
Economy at 60-Year Low, Says Darling. And It Will Get Worse: In an exclusive interview, chancellor says Labour failing to communicate with voters.

Britain is facing "arguably the worst" economic downturn in 60 years which will be "more profound and long-lasting" than people had expected, Alistair Darling, the chancellor, has told the Guardian today.

In the government's gravest assessment of the economy, which follows a warning from a Bank of England policymaker that 2 million people could be unemployed by Christmas, Darling admits he had no idea how serious the credit crunch would become.

Darling's blunt remarks lay bare the unease in the highest ranks of the cabinet that the downturn is making it all but impossible for Gordon Brown to recover momentum after a series of setbacks.

The chancellor, who says that Labour faces its toughest challenge in a generation, admits that Brown and the cabinet are partly to blame for Labour's woes because they have "patently" failed to explain the party's central mission to the country, leaving voters "pissed off". >>> By Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent | August 29, 2008

THE TELEGRAPH:
George Osborne Slams Alistair Darling for British Tax Exodus: Shadow chancellor George Osborne has accused Alistair Darling of damaging the UK economy as yet another company confirmed it is quitting the country for tax reasons >>> By Helen Power and Jonathan Russell | August 29, 2008

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Is This the First Piece of Common Sense Coming from This Government?
Photo of Alistair Darling courtesy of The Telegraph
THE TELEGRAPH: The Chancellor today criticises the culture of rewarding failure in the City by giving bonuses to executives who appear to have done little to deserve them.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Alistair Darling says that as the country heads into an economic downturn, company boards must be able to justify large bonuses. They should apply the "next-door neighbour test" of whether the payouts would be regarded as reasonable and responsible in a climate when millions of households are struggling with rising living costs, he says.

"People get fed up if they see others getting great big bonuses and they can't actually see what they did. It can be extremely frustrating," Mr Darling says.

"Boards need to ask themselves, 'Are we behaving reasonably?'… If you're leaning over the fence talking to your next-door neighbour, can you justify what you've done?"

City bankers made an estimated £7 billion in bonuses last year. The bumper bonus round was one of the largest ever for investment bankers, despite the global economic turmoil and significant falls in the value of shares on stock markets around the world. Alastair Darling Attacks Bonuses for City Failure >>> By Rachel Sylvester

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