What'cha gonna do about it?

Vince Cable, preaching to the choir at the LibDem conference in Liverpool:

“I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow (the RMT union leader) could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies, while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwritten by the taxpayer. There is much public anger about banks and it is well deserved.”

Cue predictable shock/horror reaction, led on this occasion by the Telegraph. Here Damian Reece:

Open debate is crucial but Cable is in Government not opposition. Is he trying to do what's best for business, as he should, or what's best for his fringe supporters in the Lib Dems?....Where is his sense of collective responsibility? If he doesn't discover it soon he should resign.

And here the perennially angry Janet Daley:

...as everybody and his wife has pointed out, Mr Cable’s wildly over-briefed speech is saying little about the dangers of monopolistic capitalism that is not already accepted by the most successful capitalist countries: the US has stricter anti-monopoly, anti-trust legislation than most European social democracies precisely because it genuinely believes that markets can only function properly if they are free from cartels and price-fixing scams. It has, in other words, a more robust commitment to the principles of capitalism than the lazy, corporatist governments of Europe which are happy to sink into complacent conspiracies with monopolistic interests – so long as those corporations go on producing the tax revenue to fund infinite welfare programmes.

Not just a pretty face, that Janet. In fact, not a pretty face at all, but let that pass. What's surprising right now is how so many participants in the debate over the future role of banking (though not Janet and Vince, obviously) seem to be changing sides. This week we've seen Lord Turner, the FSA chief, saying that it's time to move beyond beating up overpaid traders, and focus on devising an appropriate regulatory framework. Just a few weeks ago, the selfsame Lord Turner was regaling a conference with his scathing views on the uselessness of most financial "innovation".

Flipping at least somewhat in the opposite direction is London mayor Boris Johnson. Long an opponent of doing anything that might weaken the City, BoJo is now warning that bankers should voluntarily curb their bonuses this year, or else risk a public backlash and a possible crackdown by politicians.

The problem is, none of this is leading anywhere. Last week a grim-faced Robert Peston was one of the first journalists to report the Basle III capital requirements for the banks, describing the required increase on his BBC blog thus: "The 7% minimum represents a dramatic increase on the current minimum of 2%". The banks duly chimed in with warnings that the new rules meant that the days of cheap credit were gone forever. And next day...bank stocks rose sharply, as investors realised something that Pesto should have known: that UK banks already had more than the required cushion, and even for banks elsewhere in the world that might be less well protected, the new rules would not come into force until 2019.

The new capital rules may be largely meaningless, but at least they exist, which is more than can be said about the promised global regulatory regime. The US has gone the furthest, but the UK, mindful of the scarcely-veiled threat by the big banks to up stakes and run to Geneva if they see anything they don't like, seems paralysed. The urgency seems to have gone out of the issue, as the 2019 deadline for the Basle III rules serves to underline. Vince Cable may be righteously angry, but there's no sign that the government of which he's part is planning to do very much about it. Which will be welcome news for Janet Daley, but maybe not for the rest of us.