Time to regulate the City?
Updated on 02 April 2009
Alex Thomson writes on the day that unfettered markets will surely have to be brought into line.
So, has Thatcherism died even before Thatcher?
Was today down in the ghastly Excel Conference Centre in the Docklands of East London, that testament to Thatcherite development, the day that the death certificate for Thatcherism was written? Certainly the unfettered market and the unfettered banks gambling all over it cannot, surely, ever be the same again.
On that much pretty well everyone inside the G20 is agreed. The further outstanding issues (spending plans aside) are really on a debate about how much regulation is now needed for the City casinos around the world masquerading as investment banks, hedge funds and all the rest of it.
So look back on today as the day when perhaps the great realisation came into effect, in to physical form almost in the press conferences. The communiqué and yes - the protests too. That the markets and the free marketeers will have it again for at least a generation, the way they have had it in the past 25 years.
Expect more in the way of regulation globally. Expect the tax havens too to feel more of the heat. Expect change over the coming months.
Just as they are scrubbing out the graffiti along the walls of the Bank of England to clean up its look after the demos - so three miles away they're trying to clean up the banks' act.
Too early tonight to say how far either effort will succeed. But this was the day a large epitaph for Thatcherism was written and historians will surely note it as such.
