Summit over: Now what about the bankers?

Stumbling out into the cold Brussels night air after a surprisingly upbeat summit outcome, I continue to wrestle mentally with what it all means. Profligate, even corrupt, activity in the capitalist system has cost us dear indeed. We can whinge about European institutions but in the end Europe is only attempting to do what Britain had to do – use taxpayers’ money to make good the consequences of market madness, mortgage absurdity, criminality, and greed.

But Europe lacks the tools that the British have – a Treasury, the capacity to print money and the rest.

In America they have more weapons, or perhaps a greater preparedness to use them. Wednesday saw the arrest of yet another high profile Wall Street financier. Rajat Gupta has been charged with insider dealing. Gupta was the boss the McKinsey management consultancy for a decade and is a former board member of Goldman Sachs. In terms of Wall Street seniority, he is by far the most senior operative to have been charged.

Such a move here in London’s Square Mile is all but unthinkable. For months at Channel 4 News we have been asking both the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Services Authority when, or if, anyone is ever going to be charged with wrongdoing before, during, or since the 2008 financial meltdown. We have drawn a complete blank.

Yet prosecutors in Manhattan are sweeping through Wall Street in a kind of neo-reign of terror. Gupta is out on $10m bail. He faces 20 years in jail if found guilty. Another former McKinsey operative, Anil Kumar has already pleaded guilty to insider dealing. And of course the billionaire hedge fundista Raj Rajaratnam enters jail tomorrow for 11 years, for a similar crime. The district attorney has told us he has dozens more cases in the pipeline dealing with similar corruption.

So dear old London, now eclipsing New York as the world’s financial capital, is somehow squeaky-clean by comparison? It seems improbable. Is there not a danger that London’s supremacy will soon come to be seen as a tribute to its very soft touch when it come to the law?

If we cannot police the bankers any better than we did in 2008, what chance do last night’s delicately engineered structures of the eurozone have in shoring up the capacity to bale them out when they go wrong?

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