You have got to be kidding me

This is unreal.

Guardian: Treasury plan to force banks to lend in poorer communities

Plans to force Britain's banks to pump money into poor communities in exchange for their massive taxpayer bailouts are being drawn up by the Treasury, a senior minister has revealed.

Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, said last week that the time was ripe to consider a UK version of America's Community Reinvestment Act, introduced in the 1970s to prevent banks abandoning deprived areas.

The CRA has resulted in American banks lending billions of dollars in rundown inner-city districts, and, with public anger at the activities of financial institutions running high, Byrne said he was actively considering a similar scheme for Britain.

"It is an interesting idea, which we are exploring earnestly at the Treasury," he told a fringe meeting at last week's Labour conference in Brighton.

The chief secretary added that there were two issues that worried him and his Treasury team – the lack of any hard evidence that particular communities were being frozen out by the British banking industry, and concerns that CRA-induced lending to poor households in the US had triggered the sub-prime crisis.

"These are serious questions for us to explore," Byrne said. "But we wouldn't be looking at it if we didn't think it would be a good idea."

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding.

For those of you not keeping score, the financial crisis was, in my opinion at least, primarily caused by two things: reckless mortgages that led to the housing bubble, and reckless financing. The first was based, at least in part, on the CRA; the second was based, at least in part, on the fact that all major Western banks know their governments won't let them go bankrupt, so they can basically do what they like.

So, in order to avoid another crisis like this, what are we doing?

- the Obama administration wants to label certain companies "systemically important", and extend a guarantee that they are never going to go bankrupt (Bloomberg.com)

- the British Labour Party wants to bring subprime mortgages to Europe

Are they even trying to fix anything?