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While Fred Goodwin seems to be the focus of many today with the stripping of his knighthood, it is very easy to single out somebody to blame for the mess we are in today, but a quick look at reality and he just happened to be CEO of a bank at a time when whoever was in charge would have had the same fate.
I am not for defending banking CEO's right now, but the former RBS CEO was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Banking is a ticking time bomb and if the government wants growth in our economy, then they require banks to lend more money. That is why everybody is giving the banks a hard time for not lending more right now.
When you have to lend and lend and lend there comes a time when you cannot lend anymore without taking bad risks, but remember the government and the economy require banks to lend so we can keep up the illusion of growth.
Under Fred Goodwin's leadership RBS lent and lent and lent and when it could not lend anymore, it got creative, just like every other bank. This has been a trend for decades now and Fred Goodwin happened to be CEO at the time when the ticking time bomb was due to explode.
Did he make a lot of money out of the ticking time bomb? Yes, but so did the government and so did we when we all bought into the property bubbles created by them. We borrowed the money that banks offered us. We are all a part of it, but the easy thing to do is get angry at those who got paid the biggest cheque. Goodwin got paid a very big cheque and so we all look at him in anger. Stripping his knighthood may make us all feel better, but remember who gave it to him in the first place - the same people that wanted the economy to grow falsely by lending more and more and more.
Now the question we are left with is...are we going to focus on blame and stripping knighthoods or are we going to change the rules of money and banking so we can prevent it happening again? Experience tells me we will choose blame over real reform and wait for a bigger and badder crash.
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While we continue the promote a blame culture our institutions can claim to be responding to public opinion, without ever having to do anything constructive about how we 'change' to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Sir Fred, sorry now just plain Fred Goodwin has taken one on the chin for the same team that continues to do nothing to fix the underlying problems, and we, as members of the general public are expected to be satisfied that some sort of justice has been done to assuage our call for blood to be spilled in recompense.
Lord Archer went to prison for his crimes and remains 'Lord' Archer, still able to sit in the House of Lords and continue to steer Britain at a political level. Where is the justice in Archer keeping his title and Fred Goodwin losing his?
While we continue to call for revenge it means that the genuine issues that are really important get swept under the carpet, and when the next imminent global crash occurs you can bet there will be nobody in the current administration willing to take the fall for it!
It's time to get real and deal with the 'real issues', and precious little of that appears to be happening in the mainstream of global economics, where everyone seems determined to keep swimming against a tide of change.