Banks Withdraw Tracker Mortgages, What an Odd Job?

Happenstance, Circumstance or Co-incidence?

In Ian Fleming’s “Goldfinger”, the villain, Auric Goldfinger uses part of the above phrase after bumping into James Bond several times.  The second time he actually says to Mister Bond;

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action

In this article (Warning signs that may force committee to think big) from yesterday, Larry Elliott of the Guardian lists his probabilities for the next possible Bank of England interest rate change, later in the day.

The Base Lending Rate, since Labour gave the responsibility to the Bank of England shortly after the 1997 landslide election, is set by a bunch of folk called the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC).  They meet every month and almost without exception, by definition, are career economists to some degree.  This means, by definition, that they’ve had close ties to all the financial shenanigans that have brought us the global chaos we now are enduring.

Mysteriously, the day before yesterday, virtually all banks withdrew their tracker mortgages.  The rest followed suit late yesterday.  The Abbey even put up tracker rates!

Lenders pull tracker ranges ahead of likely cut in rates

Co-incidentally, the rate shot down a virtually unprecedented 1.5% straight afterwards!

BANK RATE CUT CAUSES CHAOS,  Banks under pressure to cut rates

So apart from some initial speculation like here, the only people who knew about this big rate cut were the MPC and maybe the Chancellor Alistair Darling, the Prime Minister Brown and any secret service folk listening in on private conversations….

Lloyds TSB & Northern Rock were some that withdrew tracker rates ahead of the MPC meeting.  Many others have made them unattainable by the kind of folk that currently have them (~90% of mortgages!)  BTW, I’m one of the 10% that have a SVR mortgage   :roll:  Trackers are unobtainable to the many because of pecunious LTV ratios which, because of the property slump, many people cannot achieve.

Now get your crystal ball out, and look forward a few years and see where these people, (who had a good chance of real knowledge about the rate changes), are working.  Check them through here, and then later decide, that if now, there has been a conflict of interest.  

Don’t decide now, the waters are too muddy.  But they will clear with the passage of time.  Adam Smith‘s “Wealth of Nations” makes this clear when he says that even though all people act through personal greed, the free market self regulates this for the common good.  In this process, motives, quite often, are only recognised well after an event.

It’s Adam Smith’s creed that we’ve been operating under for some years now.

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