Britain’s golden goose is long dead

The Barclays scandal is just the latest – and far from final – stage in this banking crisis. You should move to protect your wealth now, says John Stepek. Here, he explains how.

I'll warn you now. If you'veopened this articleexpecting a backlash against the banking backlash, you're going to be sorely disappointed. After all, if it had been left up to us here at MoneyWeek, British banks would almost all have gone bust in one way or another back in 2008 that's capitalism.

So forget all those mealy-mouthed business section columnists, pleading for calm and warning of how we need the bankers, and that we shouldn't kill the golden goose. The golden goose wrung its own neck long ago. It's only now that it's starting to smell a bit that everyone has noticed that it's dead.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.