The banking crisis of 2008 was bad for everyone except banking crisis experts.
Suddenly, an army of advisors, observers and commentators who had no idea the disaster was about to happen emerged to tell us why the disaster happened - and with the Greek economy constantly at 11.59 and never at midnight, they're still at it. But I reckon we can ignore the lot of them. I reckon all we need to do is listen to Mel from Huddersfield.
Mel is a customer services advisor at a branch of the Nat West and, with all due respect to her, she looks precisely like a customer services advisor at a branch of the Nat West. She has a gentle, trustworthy voice. She has a big, pillowy bosom. And she very probably has a tissue tucked into her sleeve so she can mop moist eyes at a minute's notice. She is solid. Traditional. Nice.
She also appears to have a skill for homing right in on what matters. "When I first started working in a bank," she told The Bank: A Matter of Life and Debt (BBC TWO, Tuesday, 9pm) "banks didn't do holiday insurance, banks didn't do house insurance, banks looked after people's money and invested it and lent it. But now supermarkets do that, everybody tries to do everybody else's job so we have to compete."
I hope the experts are listening to that, because it is, in 45 words, an explanation of the problems faced by banks and some possible solutions.
Take Mel's point about banks trying to compete with their non-banking rivals - at one point in the documentary, the cameras panned over the foyer area of the branch and it looked less like a bank and more like a bookie's or the boarding gate of a budget airline. And presumably because it's considered more accessible, the poor staff have to stand up when dealing with customers, the blood pooling in their legs as the money drains from our accounts. RBS, which owns Nat West, do it in their branches as well and it's confused, confusing, un-bank-like.
Mel was also on to something when she complained about banks selling products that were unfamiliar in the old days when banks kept money safe and lent it out to people who they thought would pay it back. Throughout the documentary, the staff kept saying they had recognised the mistakes of the past: the drive for sales, the drive to push mortgages and dodgy finance products, the targets.
"How do you show people that we're doing the right thing and have learned the mistakes of the past?" asked the branch manager Claire Blakely.
That all sounded quite nice - and the staff all seemed quite nice too and, as relatively lowly bank employees had very little to do with the reckless misbehaviour that caused the financial crash. But then the camera cut to the staff as they worked through their appointments for the day. One of them tried to sell a customer a special account. Another tried to sell life insurance. And all of them had targets to meet.
The Bank: A Matter of Life and Debt was not a sophisticated documentary by any means, but it what it did make clear was that, despite the protestations of change, there is still a confusion at the heart of banking. There is a struggle between trying to sell sophisticated products and keeping it simple. Banks aren't what they used to be and, despite the banking crisis, they still aren't. It's what Mel said. Mel was right.
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