Daily View: Should everyone get a share of bailed out banks?
Commentators look at Nick Clegg's proposal for everyone on the electoral register to be given shares in the bailed out banks RBS and Lloyds.
Eamonn Butler, the director of the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute, that the problem with having millions ofÌýshareholders is that you lose having an owner that cares about how the bank is run:
"If you give shares to around 46 million people, few will actually be interested in running the business or even owning the shares. A large minority probably do not even understand what shares are. Many would want to turn them into cash at the earliest opportunity.
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"That is what went wrong with Russia's voucher privatisation, when millions of citizens sold their free shares for a few roubles - allowing today's oligarchs to get very wealthy indeed. You don't want oligarchs, but you do want some concentration in the ownership of a large company. You can't get 46 million to a shareholders' meeting."
But about an eventual concentration of owners:
"A company with a massively diverse shareholder base, none of whom vote because none of whom think they have any influence, is susceptible to control by a small minority of shareholders who can capture a block of shares at modest cost?
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"And therein I think lies his plan: this is about letting a minority have control at remarkably little cost whilst they exploit the state that will have given them that opportunity and the rest of us who would be taken for a ride."
that the idea is inefficient:
"There would be a tremendous administrative cost - £250m has been suggested - at a time when the Government needs to reduce spending. Legal records of 45 million shareholders would need to be kept and all those people would be entitled to the information that any company has to send its shareholders."
Ìýthat although it seemed instinctively wrong, it is actually quite a neat solution:
"The government gets cash to reduce the deficit and the public get a potential windfall that can be taxed. The downside, of course, is that the government would give up any theoretical upside. And if the FTSE, for example, changed the free float weighting of Lloyds and RBS to reflect the warrants there could be increased demand for the shares from tracker funds."
The the theory as worth considering, despite practical hurdles:
"Mr Clegg's proposal, to offer a straightforward repayment to individual taxpayers for their generosity, faith and cash, has the appeal of both fairness and simplicity. It is unlikely that this action alone will recuperate the terrible reputations that bankers now endure in Britain. This newspaper has argued before that acts of retribution against the financial services industry are self-defeating in a nation that relies on it so heavily. However, there is no doubt that the actions of a minority imperilled the economic health of the majority, whose money was called upon to keep the system solvent. The mass ownership of RBS and Lloyds could be a good way to say thank you."
