Financial Markets: Stability

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey. It is very tempting to use the opportunity he provided to reflect on the immediate impact of the reckless unleashing in September of failed 1980s policies built on a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of markets—which are not some abstract, immutable, timeless force but a human creation shaped by human-made rules and, as ours are now constructed, subject to wild irrationality and mindless seeking of short-term profit without any concern for long-term costs, structured so that a few benefit and the rest of us pay.

But I am not going to do that. Instead, I am going to focus on stability, which the noble Lord asks us to contemplate with reference to the obvious recent impacts of instability on pensions, mortgages and the rental market—to put it another way, on the provisions of the essential needs of life, or the needs for survival.

Stability demands resilience and resistance to shocks. It is not just our financial markets that need resilience but our entire society in this age of shocks: pandemics; geopolitical earthquakes; the climate emergency and nature crisis; and demographic shifts such as our ageing population. In the past we tried to deal with such issues with stress tests. To quote the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Jon Cunliffe, in a recent letter to the UK Treasury Select Committee,

“the scale and speed of repricing leading up to Wednesday 28 September far exceeded historical moves, and therefore exceeded price moves that are likely to have been part of risk management practices or regulatory stress tests.”

A stress test can only ever be as effective as the stress that it can imagine, and we are now in an age of shocks like we have never seen before.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St. Albans asked whether we should not have better stress tests but, practically, this is not enough. No one truly understands the current system and, as the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, so powerfully outlined, we have an innately risky and unstable system that is absolutely stock-full of fraud and corruption, as well as a lack of transparency.

It might be said that maybe this is the price we have to pay to live in a modern society. As the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, said, I think it is worth looking back to the excellent House of Lords Library briefing here, which—I think rather pointedly—started by quoting the Bank of England’s definition of financial stability. It says that it is

“the consistent supply of the vital services that the real economy”

needs. Those are the human needs that the noble Lord’s questions refer to: the need for a roof over your head and for an income when you are old so that you can feed yourself. We can look again to the Bank of England’s website to ask: what are financial markets for? The Bank of England says that

“financial markets … exist to bring people together so money flows to where it is needed most.”

Let us think about where money has been flowing. If we go back to 2007-08, where did money flow? It flowed massively into the banks, to rescue them. At that moment, that had to happen or the cash machines would have stopped working and no one would have had any money to buy their food, et cetera. But what happened after that? The money stopped flowing to our essential public services; it stopped flowing to the basic benefits that keep people alive.

I invite noble Lords to imagine an alien landing on Earth today, in the UK. Where does money need to flow? Obviously, it needs to flow into households that are struggling to heat their homes and feed their children; into schools contemplating a four-day week because they have not got enough income; and into hospitals with queues out the door. But where is it flowing? It is flowing to tax havens and rich men’s yachts; it is swilling around and around in the City of London.

To give some figures, according to the Bank of England, lending from banks to the non-financial sectors accounts for only 20% of their balance sheets. The rest is interbank claims: money swilling around and around in the financial sector. Now, that figure excludes trading derivatives, which are often several times larger than banks’ balance sheets. The fact is that on banks’ balance sheets, their loans make up a tiny proportion of their total banking interests. Two-thirds of the non-financial lending goes into mortgages, pumping up prices, and the rest into business assets, again pumping up prices.

The Treasury directed the Financial Conduct Authority in the last financial crisis to make financial markets work well. If they work well, they have to serve the real economy, which they patently and clearly are not doing now. They are risking the secure future of us all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I cannot confirm that, but I am sure that when that Bill comes to this House, we will spend sufficient time scrutinising its provisions and ensuring that they deliver the outcome that we all want—a stronger financial services sector—which is important not just for the City of London but for people’s everyday lives in the country.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

The Minister referred to the amount of employment from the financial sector, which, by my figures, is about 7% of total paid employment, meaning that 93% of people are not working in the financial sector. If the Government are focusing their efforts on increasing the financial sector while failing to meet the needs of the sectors of the economy that provide 93% of jobs, are we not all losing out?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I do not believe that that characterisation is right. Ensuring that we have a strong financial services sector also benefits many other parts of our economy in terms of access to capital, and many other things. It does not need to be at the expense of the rest of our economy. It strengthens the rest of our economy.