The response to the Barclays issue has been ridiculous - our politicians are running a real risk of brow beating a good company for their own political purposes.For anyone that actually followed the interrogation / enquiry yesterday, what Bob Diamond said is that as soon as Barclays were alerted to the bad behaviour they alerted the FSA and gave their full cooperation - this hasn't been contradicted by the FSA so is likely to be true.We were also told that their LIBOR reports showed a sudden fall after Barclays agreed a private bail out - the point at which other banks tool public money Barclays did not. Again, this seems to be true.So what we effectively have is a kangaroo court that is more interested in scoring political points than building an understanding of what went on - the MPs tell us the CEO must be lying or incompetent if he didn't know what was going on but many of the loudest voices have never held "real jobs", led organisations or been accountable for complex systems with 100,000+ employees - the question we should really be asking is are the MPs really sufficiently qualified to offer a view in the first place.As it currently stands, the losses to customers from the LIBOR fixes are small - many customers in fact gained as it enabled Barclays to borrow at lower rates with lower onward borrowing costs to customers.The real issue right now is that Barclays has lost around 1/4 of it's capitalisation in a week - as one of the largest companies in the FTSE 100 this affects all of us who have private sector pensions / investments in the FTSE.Before we get too carried away perhaps we should look beyond the MPs rhetoric to the detailed facts, which at this point do not show that Bob Diamond has told anything but the truth.
Chris Martin ● 5025d