Godfrey Bloom MEP UKIP (Yorkshire & N. Lincs)
Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) Group Commissioner: MR.Bloom has two minutes.
MR. Bloom: I will, Commissioner, Mr. President. I rise again. I'm afraid to make the same old hoary speech that I've been making here for several years and that is, it is my opinion that you do not really understand the concept of banking.
All the banks are broke. Bank Santander, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland… they're all broke.
Oh, why are they broke? It isn't an act of God. It isn't some sort of tsunami.
They're broke because we have a system called fractional reserve banking, which means that friends can lend money that they don't actually have.
It's a criminal scandal and it's been going on for too long.
To add to that problem, you have moral hazard, a very significant moral hazard from the political sphere.
Most of the problems start in politics. And central banks, which are part of the same political system, we have counterfeiting sometimes called quantitative easing, but counterfeiting by any other name. The artificial printing of money, which, if any ordinary person did, they'd go to prison for a very long time. And yet, governments and central banks do it all the time.
Central banks repress the amount of interest rates raised, so we don't have the real cost of money.
And yet, we blame the real retail banks for manipulating the Labor. The sheer effrontery of this is quite astonishing.
It's central banks. It's central banks that manipulate interest rates, Commissioner.
And plus, underneath all this, we talk loosely in a rather cavalier fashion, do we not, about deposit guarantees, so when banks go broke through their own incompetence and chicanery, the taxpayer picks up the tab.
It's theft from the taxpayer. And until we start sending bankers, and I include central bankers and politicians, to prison for this outrage, it will continue!
