Bad Banking or Risk Taking?

• published: 19 Feb 2015
• views: 25

Bad Banking or Risk Taking? What's your sentiment on the national perception about bank traders and the whole banking industry? Nicole Elliot, technical analyst and private investor comments. The whole industry has come under hate mail quite frankly. For me this is just business and popular opinion is just driven by media. Banks borrow at one rate and lend it at another - they are taking risks. Trading has always been in banking...People are not thinking thru to the end. - We all got caught up in the property boom that swept out little Buy-to-Let Apartment country from 2000 to 2007. Suddenly we were all property investors of some shape or other, from reading the 40+ page property supplements in our newspapers back to front each week to buying a holiday home in Portugal to buying a couple of “buy to lets” in Carrick-On-Shannon to buying the 5 or 6 apartments in Bratislava! Yep from one end of the extreme to the other we all took part in Ireland’s property boom. - Our new found wealth and love for property speculation led to us demanding our banks to lend us more money for the next “buy-to-let” as much as it was our banks calling us up to suggest we do a bit more refinancing so that we could consider getting into the Cape Verde Islands before everyone hears about it! We would have being well pissed off if they said we could only have 10 times our salary this time round… - Regardless of the reckless lending by the banks, we were the ones that decided a 1 bed apartment on the Quays was worth half a mil or whatever… - And of course our government was only too happy to count all the extra stamp duty it was raking in each year while at the same time trying to figure out how best it could put all this extra money to waste rather than maybe putting some of it away for the next downturn… - For those who lost 80 or 90% of their life’s savings due to the collapse in the share prices of the banks, the question has to be asked why did you put all your eggs (excuse the pun) in one basket. So while I certainly feel for those that lost their life’s savings, especially the older members of society who more than likely will not have the opportunity to regain these losses, I don’t think it is right for everyone to now decide that it’s all the bankers fault, and that they should now be all strung up and eggs thrown at them.