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The board of embattled Northern Rock PLC faced shareholders Tuesday amid growing speculation that Britain's biggest casualty of the global credit crisis will be nationalized.

Hundreds of investors attended a meeting to vote on proposals by two key shareholders that would restrict the power of the board to reach a private sale -- proposals that analysts say could simply speed up the move toward nationalization.

That fear was reflected in a share sell-off in trading ahead of the meeting, pushing Northern Rock's already battered stock 11 percent lower.

While the government continues to say it would prefer a private buyer for Northern Rock, it has already lined up a former Lloyd's of London senior executive to run the bank in the event it is taken under state control.

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http://edition.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/01/15/northernrock.meeting.ap/index.html

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Dr Ridley, who has a D Phil in zoology, is no stranger to good science, and his explorations of our evolutionary history, which are often fascinating and provoking, are based on papers published in peer-reviewed journals. But whenever a conflict arose between his scientific training and the interests of business, he would discard the science. Ignoring hundreds of scientific papers which came to the opposite conclusion, and drawing instead on material presented by a business lobby group called the Institute of Economic Affairs, he argued that global temperatures have scarcely increased, so we should stop worrying about climate change(4). He suggested that elephants should be hunted for their ivory(5), planning laws should be scrapped(6), recycling should be stopped(7), bosses should be free to choose whether or not their workers contract repetitive strain injury(8) and companies, rather than governments, should be allowed to decide whether or not the food they sell is safe.(9) He raged against taxes, subsidies, bail-outs and government regulation. Bureaucracy, he argued, is “a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world … governments do not run countries, they parasitise them.”(10)

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
Just to add to the irony, the CEO of the bank is an honest-to-God, Friedman-ite, neo-con.

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
Geez...so THAT's what it takes for "New Labour" to actually carry out a LABOUR policy?

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I think Labour is allowing neocon ideology to fail on its own over time. We've bailed out banks in Canada for their gambling losses a few times since the 1980's.

Economist: Relax Basel banking rules

Apparently bank auditors are risking malfeasance unless they change the rules. More bailouts

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
Just to add to the irony, the CEO of the bank is an honest-to-God, Friedmam-ite, neo-con.

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Even more irony: Why is a bank being run by a guy who was trained as a ZOOLOGIST?

[ 15 January 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

William F. Buckley, Jr. says it's regulation time!

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Regulation in some form or other is almost everywhere licensed and, generally, applauded. If competitors run taxi companies, regulation denies to any one of them an exclusive franchise: Do not seek to eliminate the competition. And there is regulation built into progressive taxation: The winner climbs into a higher tax bracket, and is thus burdened to the advantage (in the short term) of the competitor.

The mortgage crisis came on because our free society did not think to intervene at a juncture where it could have limited the effects of cosmic thoughtlessness and insouciant greed.

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Northern Rock is no different from Citigroup or the many other banks facing bankruptcy except that the reality is faced in dear old blighty while their chums across the pond prefer to spin a rosy picture whilst the banks are dismantled behind the scenes.

The profitable bits of these huge entities will be sold off (to friends of the family,no doubt)while the shareholder and taxpayer are stuck with the bill for the remainder.