HOW Osama Bin Laden must be laughing at us from his cave in Afghanistan. We marked the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war with a suicide mission intent on destroying our own economy and banking system.
There has never been any doubt that the planes which targeted the twin towers of the World Trade Center flew not just to kill as many Americans and Europeans as they could at a stroke. It was a symbolic attack designed to strike right at the heart
of capitalism.
He needn't have bothered. If he'd just waited a while, the teenage terminators who stalk our trading floors would have done his dirty work for him. How their grandfathers must be turning in their graves.
It seems the children of the heroes of the Battle of Britain have spawned a new generation of kamikaze pilots intent on our destruction. Rather than the enemy, it is us they have in their sights.
By us, I mean anyone who has a savings account, mortgage, pension or indeed job. The serious consequences for everyone, had last week's attack on Halifax Bank of Scotland's share price succeeded, don't bear thinking about.
The shameless episode was motivated by ruthless greed on the part of a few, and irresponsible imbecility by the many.
How many unsolicited e-mails do you get from unknown sources every day? Me? Hundreds.
If you got one, as traders did, saying a bank was in trouble, the first thing you would do is run a reality check.
Say the bank was HBOS. Your first reaction might be Wow! It's Britain's biggest mortgage lender. It could be at risk.
Then you'd think, hang on a minute. This e-mail says it's going to the Bank of England for a sub because it's run out of money.
The next question you would ask is: Why? HBOS has 15 million depositors, and one of the best savings brands in the world. It only needs to launch a new account with a sexy rate, and the money will come flooding in.
The sums savers will willingly give the bank would quickly dwarf a few paltry billions they'd get from Governor Mervyn King. Indeed, a quick glance at the savings best buy tables would reveal that Halifax is currently uncharacteristically absent. This is a clear signal that, right now, it doesn't need money.
Do you think any of our teenage terminators bothered to look at the savings best buy tables before they hit the phones intent on destroying one of Britain's biggest companies?
Next you'd ask yourself: if they were a tad short of the readies what else could they do to bring in cash? Well, they have 2.5 million borrowers, only a chunk of whom are on fixed rates. That leaves plenty of scope to increase interest on variable and discounted deals. It is true HBOS has pushed up trackers by 0.5%, but so have many other large lenders. It is a good sign they are managing their book.
I'm no apologist for HBOS, and am fully aware they engaged in some of the high risk lending which fills me with horror. But they did this through a small subsidiary, and it's peanuts compared with the rest of the business.
Finally, I would ask myself how would HBOS cope if the market crashed? And for that I would look to their record.
And I would find the answer is: they are better placed to manage and survive a substantial property downturn than almost any other business in Europe.
How do I know? Because Halifax emerged from the housing slumps of the early 1970s, 1980s and 1990s stronger not weaker, when competitors went to the wall. As the UK's biggest mortgage lender, it has been managing its business through busts as well as bubbles for generations. It knows how to do it.
And I'll share a secret with you. During the last recession, for about five years, my phone seemed to ring every 10 minutes from someone facing repossession and desperate for help. Remember 1,500 families lost their homes every week.
Halifax repossessed more property than half the rest of the industry put together, because it was bigger than half the rest. Yet I never received a single call from a Halifax borrower. To this day, I don't know how they did it. But I do know they possess the expertise to manage a housing crisis better than anyone else.
But the teenage terminators didn't ask themselves any of these questions. An e-mail arrives from the ether and they just thought "MORTGAGE GIANT SELL" . And in hitting the phones they nearly brought down a company owned by 2.1 million small shareholders, with a savings account in virtually every home.
As Franklin Roosevelt said of Wall Street during the Great Depression: "They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers."
The full article contains 830 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
