A Little Nationalisation Anyone?

We are happy at the news that officials are hard at work looking at the extension of the Government guarantee to borrowings by our banks from the international credit markets, but we are a little worried by some of the comments by Dr Cullen about why we have to be cautious and take time to get the policy right. We agree that we must get the policy right - we don't want last week's embarrassment of having to change policy just three days after it was announced. But we don't like the focus on the fact that so many of our banks are foreign owned. This seems to us to be setting up the potential for a requirement to be imposed on our banks that if they want this guarantee they will have to accept a partial nationalisation - along the lines of that which Labour has just imposed in the UK. We hope that we are wrong here.